(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamOn 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans, everybody, I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. There's been a lot of talk of course this week because of WannaCry about ransomware. Edward Haletki is here, he is the principal at TVP Strategy and he and I were having a conversation the other night about ransomware. Edward is a security expert, strategist, been around a long time, Edward, good to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me again. >> Let's riff on this a little bit. You had some really, I thought, thought-provoking ideas about ransomware. I was making the point that look, if you got an air gap, you're good, right, and you said, "Well, no," I said, "Well, what if you have an offsite tape?" And you said, "Well, it's not that simple." >> Edward: It really isn't. >> What's the deal with how to protect myself against ransomware? >> Well, let's just start with a few things. This particular about of ransomware is actually in version 2.0. So the guy found the kill switch for the first version, they already fixed that bug and put it out again. So now it's hitting over 200,000 machines in 99 countries. It's spreading around the world like crazy. The only way that I found to protect yourself is to actually have the ability to do, in a lot of ways, versioned writes. In other words, you keep a version of everything. That's important, but you got to first figure out what's important. But it's more than that. It's an entire architecture around data protection, security and even your business. You need to start with, if you're talking about from the security perspective, you need to start with a way to prevent what's known. If I can prevent what's known from getting to you, like phishing attacks and other attacks, I can prevent you from spreading ransomware into your company. So that's kind of a gate, but if that comes through the gate which it could and it did, you need something able to detect ransomware. And that is a detection that data protection's prime to do. >> But like, okay, explain this. Sort of revisit the conversation we had. If I have an air gap, meaning I've got a separate data center that's disconnected somehow or periodically disconnected, as some vendors have suggested, I'll rotate the connection. And I've got data off site. Let's say I've even got it off site in tape, even though I would ideally not like to recover from tape. Why am I not protected in that scenario? >> It depends on the retention schedule. If the retention schedule's long enough, you'd probably be fine. Most people don't find out there's ransomware until they reboot a machine. >> Dave: And they've rotated through their tapes by then, you're saying. >> They could possibly do that. Some of the smaller businesses, they probably have. Some of the larger businesses that keep yearly and monthly and so forth, and they keep them for seven years probably haven't. But as we move move further and further away from tape and more to the connected universe, even multiple copies of something doesn't necessarily protect you, unless they're immutable copies. >> Well, Phil, Bill Philbin said it today, he said, in a different way, he said, "When we make boo-boos "and we replicate the boo-boos, we replicate really fast," and I tweeted out, I said, well, if there's malicious encryption, that probably replicates really fast. >> Edward: It does. >> Okay, and so. I mean, maybe we should explain the basics here as that's really what the ransomware folks are doing, right, they're encrypting your data and then saying, "Hey, you want the keys back, you got to pay us," is that-- >> Well, and actually, the new breed is, "Hey, pay us and we won't even give you the keys." >> Well, you know, I was watching CNBC the other day when WannaCry hit and one of the experts that they had on, the CNBC analysts asked them, the anchor's asked them, "Well, what do you do?" And they said, "Well, unfortunately, "you just might have to pay the ransom," which was surprising to me because there's no guarantee you're going to get the keys. >> The keys, but it's actually 60 million dollars worth of ransom right now. That's a lot of money. >> Okay, so-- >> I mean, this is, it's 300 dollars a bitcoin to get your key. >> Dave: Right, you're paying in bitcoin, obviously. >> Which is also, that's expensive to get. And a lot of companies just don't have bitcoins lying around, so they have to go out to either mine them or-- >> Dave: Or go to a marketplace. >> Go to marketplace and buy them. >> Especially the people that are still running Windows XP aren't necessarily the people that are bitcoin experts. >> Exactly. >> Okay, so now, what you had suggested to me was that the backup software vendor, we're here at VeeamOn and we're at a Veeam event, backup software vendor actually has data because they're pushing change data to the network periodically. And in theory, they could use analytics to identify anomalous behavior. >> Edward: Exactly. >> In terms of encryption activity that's higher than normal. Explain that. >> Well, there's a couple of ways you can do that. One is that you could look at the CPU utilization, say hey, it's a high CPU utilization, something's going on. Unfortunately, you can't tell if that's a normal action or a non-action, an encryption action, especially with the new chipsets, encryption's very very fast. And the overhead's very very little, could just hide in the noise. When you look at data though, as it gets encrypted, when I do data protection, normally in a virtualized environment or even in a physical environment these days we do something called change block tracking. Or the equivalent thereof in the physical world. And what that does is that, for every block that changes of the file system, I can, that gets sent over to be protected. So as those increase because I'm encrypting more and more and more, you're going to see an increase in the number of blocks that have changed. You could say normally that machine does maybe a kilobyte per backup. And suddenly you're doing a gigabyte. That's a huge difference, that's a big red flag saying hey, something's gone wrong, that's not normal. >> What about this idea of like, honeypot files, like here's where we store all the credit cards file. >> Edward: Oh, we call them canary files. >> Canary files, great. >> And this is, canary files are another way you can detect things. If you have a file server, you should just put a canary file out there, nice juicy name, you know, CEO's whatever, something like that, a spreadsheet, it could be an expense report that you know is ancient. It doesn't make any difference. What that canary file is used for is you just periodically query the file, like, can I read you? It doesn't have to be a big file, it just means I can read you, 'cause it's going to encrypt the whole thing. Once I can't read it anymore, you know, you've been hit by ransomware usually. >> Right, because there's no reason you would've encrypted that file. >> Or even touched it, no one should be touching it. >> Dave: Right, some zombie file. >> Exactly. >> Okay. Now, for a company like Veeam to put a solution, I mean, I'm making the case that there should be specific solutions in the marketplace for ransomware. >> Edward: Oh, absolutely. >> Not just a sort of hand waving and buy our product because of ransomware, it should be a specific solution geared towards solving the problem. What does that solution look like, how would a company like Veeam, who would the partners be that they would put that together, what types of companies would they need, what type of capabilities would be required? >> Well, for Veeam, I think you need four general capabilities. They have one of them, that's the recovery stage. They have instant, the capability to do instant recoveries. That is a must, so if you have ransomware, to recover the business, you just do an instant recovery of a known good source. The other one is on the front end, you really need the prevention. In other words, I'm going to prevent people from doing fishing or I'm going to prevent attacks coming in with that type of payload. So if it's an encrypted payload, don't let it through. Those are possible. The middle of it is the detection, and then what we call legal hold. In other words, I want to say, okay, I detected the possibility of ransomware. And then I want to mark this recover point, the one that I'm currently backing up, as potential for ransomware so the one before that is the one I say, "Hey, don't delete that one "until I've inspected it," and that's the one you may do the instant recovery off of. >> Okay, so prevention, I mean, that's just good practice. But let's assume for a second-- >> That's a security company has those capabilities, some of them do a really good job at that, but even with something like WannaCry, you can't prevent someone from clicking on a link. >> Right, so assume for a second that I didn't prevent it. So I should do that as best practice, but assume I didn't prevent it, so I got to have detection. >> Edward: Absolutely. >> They've penetrated, now I'm using what, analytics to look for anomalous behavior? >> I'm either using a canary file or I'm using analytics at the data protection layer. I could even use analytics at the storage layer to say, "Hey, there's a lot of changes happening," that's going to go down the storage path and I'm going to be able to see it there as well. >> Okay, and then legal hold, in 2006 when the federal rules of civil procedure changed and they said electronic documents are now admissible. Most large companies and certainly large companies in regulated industries began to implement techniques to do legal holds, particularly around email archiving, which was just one piece of the problem. That's a complicated problem. >> It is, but it's really legal hold like. It's the concepts of legal hold, but applied specifically to data protection. In other words, you want to say the recover point that I'm currently writing to could be bad. We don't know, so mark the recover point previous to that as don't delete. Don't mark the one you're just doing, it's the one previous to that. 'Cause what could happen is you may not do the instant restore 'cause they're fine. But three days later when that one's going to roll off, it rolls off and it may go away. And if it goes away, you're sunk. >> Okay, and then fast recovery, which is the capability that you said Veeam has, obviously. >> Edward: I would say some recovery, yeah. >> Am I to infer that an air gap is not required? >> Well, when you start doing the... It is and isn't. If you have a good architecture, that architecture's going to include things like going to an immutable storage source. So I'm going to store my backups on an immutable source or target. And that immutable target, the best one today is really an object store where it has versioned rights. Every version that gets written is immutable. So as you do data protection, you write to a new version a full image, so it's a synthetic full image that gets put into that blob of storage. So I have my target for, my Veeam target, let's say, and then Veeam would replicated that or do something to put that on this object store for versioned writes. Then what happens is I can either restore from the Veeam target, but let's say that gets corrupted, now I can go back to the object store as the ultimate source saying, "Hey, I'll just go back "to the immutable versions." >> Okay, when I hear immutability, I often think of blockchain. Can blockchain, does it fit in here in the future, can it help solve problems like this? >> Yes and no, blockchain is actually very old. We've been doing blockchain encryption for ages. EBC was an electronic blockchain for encryption. I'm not sure it's actually going to solve that problem. But immutable is basically non-writable, that's what I'm talking about, you can't change it once it's written. And if you can protect that using blockchain and the metadata and all that, that's fine. But I don't think that's necessary. >> It's like containers too. Everything's been around forever. (laughs) >> It has been. I mean, when you think about, but this particular one is really taking advantage of what object stores have to offer today. And there's several companies that have that capability and it adds a nice layer, we think it's archive, but it's not, to me it would be the intermediary. It's the pre-archive, it's kind of like, okay, put it there, and then I may archive that off on a retention schedule. >> Excellent, Edward, great analysis, thank you very much, appreciate that, so Stu, let me bring you into the conversation, put a bow on VeeamOn 2017, what are you takeaways? >> So Dave, we go to a lot of shows and love when you have a community that's excited. That term love is not one that you hear at many shows, I mean, I'm sure Edward probably-- >> Edward: I would agree. >> I love VMware bumper stickers that people have. Technology is, you know, we're down in the weeds here. I mean, here's people that are passionate about availability and backup. The thing that I was looking for coming on to this show, Dave, is what they addressed, you know, day one and the main keynote. Which is the big wave of virtualization has kind of gone past, you know, the peak of where it is. And how can they look at that next generation, can they hop on the waves? The things that I really liked, we got to talk to a lot of customers, Dave, customers, passionate, not only the enterprise where they've been getting into, but talked to a number of service providers including some interviews that we did where they like what they're doing, they keep building. Public cloud and where Veeam fits, I think it's early days. Want to see how that develops, want to see how customers use it, we did talk to one customer that was really excited about where that'll fit in. I like that Veeam has, you know, clear eyes as to where their future is and they're embracing that change. I always hear, sometimes you hear that term embrace and you're like, yeah yeah yeah, sure, you're kind of giving it lip service, but are you going to be able to move forward on that new trend, because as we talked, Dave, in a couple of segments here during our two days of interviews, usually when there's a shift in the landscape, the players change, the previous incumbent will not be the leader going forward. And Veeam has a strong team, they've put a lot of new people in place, and they know where the battles will be fought. Early days in some of this next wave, but it was exciting to be here and happy to share it with you. >> Yeah, I mean, I learned a lot about Veeam. Most of my interaction with the company have been either informal or kick in the tires, v tugs and v mugs where you've seen them for years. I came in knowing that the press releases talked about 600 million dollars in bookings, ambitions to become a billion dollar company. Very rapid growth rate, 45,000 partners. So that was quite interesting, to see that in action. This company's got real big ambitions, this idea of being sort of the availability expert for whatever use case you want, whether it's in the cloud or going to the cloud or coming from the cloud or between clouds, is very ambitious. I think that's a wide open space. I suspect it's a big market, although it's really emerging, and I suspect all the individual cloud vendors are going to be going, trying to protect their little parts of the world, companies like VMware are going to want to try to own that inter-clouding space and other startups are trying to get in there. It's a sort of jump ball in my view there, but I like the ambition. It was interesting to hear Peter McKay talk about Veeam in the context of software companies that are growing and growing fast, getting to 800 million which they're not there yet, the likes of Workday and Salesforce and ServiceNow. Of course, those are all public companies and Veeam is a private company, so it can write its own narrative. >> They've got enough revenue, Dave, that they could be public. There've been plenty of companies that have IPOed with much less revenue. I'm shocked you haven't mentioned it, Dave, profitability. I mean, in today's day and age, a company of the size that they are, and they're still growing at a rapid pace and they are profitable. So you know, kudos there. >> Yeah, and then the other thing that struck me was the pace of product announcements, I always look for that. At a lot of the shows that we go to, you hear a lot of hand waving about digital transformation, but you don't see a lot of products coming out. So there was some excitement around the products, so that's a good sign that they can turn strategy into R&D into products that sell that the partners are taking and uptaking. So it was a good sort of first experience certainly for me at VeeamOn and theCUBE, and Stu, always a pleasure working with you, we got, excuse me, get to take a break. The boys get to go home after 20 days on the road, and then, you know, we're cranking up again. We got shows every single week in June, multiple shows, US, international, so to to siliconangle.tv, check that out, check out our schedule. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news, wikibon.com is cranking some stuff out as well. Edward, thanks for sitting in. >> Oh, my pleasure. I do have one thing to interject, I've actually looked at Veeam from a totally different perspective. I've been watching them and monitoring them for about 10 years. From their technology perspective. Actually over 10 years, I started with them. So I went through the virtualization, backup wars with them and all the other companies. Their rate of innovation, their rate of change has actually been far greater than many other data protection companies. It's not just their new releases, it's their whole, they've gone through several shifts in messaging. And several shifts in what their products do. And it's been fascinating to watch. >> Well, and that's a really good point, because a lot of the traditional backup software companies are living on maintenance. And it seems like Veeam is trying to, as Pat Gelsinger says, catch the wave and not be left in the dust as driftwood. All right, we're going to leave it there, thanks for watching, everybody. We will see you next time, and take care. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody, this is theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. A lot of noise on cloud, a lot of signal on cloud, and we've been unpacking that. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Alexander Kozlyaev is here. He's the Head of IT Architecture at MTS. He's joined by Konstantin Yakovlev, who is the lead System Architect at MTS, a telecommunications company in Ukraine. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Not Ukraine, in Russia. >> Oh, it's not Ukraine. Oh sorry, just hear Ukraine. >> We had some bad data. We'll make sure to clean that up. >> Yeah, yeah, we have a data quality problem here. Sorry about that. Okay, yes my apologies. Okay, let's start with Alexander. Maybe you could describe MTS and tell us a little bit about the company. >> Yeah, surely. MTS is one of the largest mobile operator in Russia. It represents the Russian market for the last 23 years. So currently, our subscribers in Russia only maybe counted by the number of 80 million. We have subsidiaries in different countries like Belarussia, like Romania, and other countries. So we are putting forward our digital services, cellular services and others. Me, personally, working from the first day of MTS so I'm roughly 20 years in MTS staff, starting as system administrator. >> Okay, so you've seen the evolution of the various backup and we'll come back to that. But I wanted to ask Konstantin, it's a long way to come to a show like this. How are you enjoying the show? What has it been like for you? >> It's a nice conference but main thing for us, I think it's backup of physical servers. Because now we have different systems to backup physical servers and virtual servers. Maybe we hope in the future to join these systems, and have only one backup for all our services. So it's good step for Veeam to make a physical backup also. I think it's main goal for us here in this conference. >> Okay, so that was one of the big announcements this week. Of course, Veeam is oftentimes been pointing out that up until this point has not backup bare metal servers, physical servers as you say, and now that happens. So that allows you to consolidate your backup architecture, is that right? >> Maybe, we hope. It's a first step. It's a first step, so now we have to look how Veeam will backup bare metal servers. >> We would like to harmonize our backup software because currently we have three or more even backup software featuring like Symantec, like Network Error. So we would like to join them, and to choose best of breed of them. Currently Veeam software now can play this role as being the big player like them. >> Alexander, you have the history of MTS. You've seen the backup systems of all from before virtualization. >> Alexander: Yeah, all the way through. >> Can you share with us the MTS backup and data protection journey? >> Backup and data protection journey. Surely, it started from very simple tape drives staying on top of the table. I am personally was who repairing them from jammed tapes and so on, (faint) tape, autoloaders and others, and others. But nowadays, we have a huge amount of data. Okay, it's very big amount of data. So simple tapes cannot operate properly. So we have historically a different software solutions to which we acquired with different companies which were merged with us. So currently, we would like to harmonize all these suite of software features. So the how big way was passed by. >> So from an IT architecture perspective, Konstantin, what are the big challenges in the telecommunications industry in terms of high availability? We hear a lot about always on. What does that mean to your business? >> I think it's maybe always on is not a first main goal today. Maybe for us, main goal is NFE, if you heard about it. It's virtualization of network part of telecommunication company. This is a first and main question. After that, we can talk about always on, and data protection because in telecommunication world, it's very important part of our business. >> Dave: So NF-- >> So just NFE is really about being able to deliver software services to your users. >> I would like to say NFE is being like a tool. But real goal is agility of the business because we are challenging very different range of tasks, and we need to act very fast. So the only way to withstand such threats is to react very fast by means of very flexible infrastructure. So the only way is to build NFE infrastructure NFE radius so. >> It's a shift in mind. >> Yeah, I think back, I worked in telecommunications 20 years ago. Lots of big gear, and cabling, and it's a software world now. NFE is just part of the term to help you deliver agility sounds right. >> Just to (accented) into solutions, which are built everywhere. >> I've talked to many of the large telecommunication vendors over the years. The whole cloud wave, some telecommunication players try to be a cloud provider. Most of them, NFE is an exciting thing they're looking at. How does cloud impact your journey? >> It doesn't impact us very, how to say, I guess. So currently, what do impact us most of all is the need to reorganize our internal processes. Currently we are not cloud oriented in our minds, and our process have other dimensions that our company more than 20 years old. All the processes from the very beginning. So most of them should be re-in full completely and build up from scratch. So currently it's a big, big task, and we are trying to work with that. We are talking with helps, you know the tool. For example, to state the tasks in different ways, to work different, think different as we probably should. >> Where does Veeam fit in? You mentioned you have a lot of different flavors of backup software because you have to support both physical servers and virtual servers. Where does Veeam fit in, and where do you see it going? >> Veeam is our main solution for backup of virtualized systems. In IT, we already virtualized most part of our systems but now we start this NFE process in telecommunication part. So Veeam will play more, and more important role in our life because we start to transform our telecommunication part to move it to IT-like world. In IT, the Veeam is main solution for backup virtual machines. So in all other part of our company, Veeam will start to play this role as a main solution of data protection for the virtual machines. So when more and more virtual servers will appear in our life, Veeam will play more, and more important role. So this is a Veeam role in our life. This is a main solution for backup virtual machines so. >> Yeah, it's got to be more and more reliant on that platform to support your future. >> Less and less physical servers but still as head of one of the division in Veeam said, we cannot virtualize 100%. So always will be some small part of physical servers. >> Okay, good, well we're out of time. Thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Stu: Appreciate it. >> Alexander: Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> All right, keep it right there buddies. Stu and I will be back to wrap right after this short break. Be right back. (enlightening music)

>> Mind the fact that HP just started re-selling Veeam. We now have a combination of a very strong technology portfolio, deep integration, and a commitment to good market partnership. The combination we think will be very exciting for HP member and Veeam customers in the years to come. >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back, welcome to theCUBE and VeeamON 2017, my name is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Vladimir Val Taft is here, he's the principle infrastructure architect at Granite Construction. Val, good to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Pleasure. >> So tell use about Granite Construction, what do you guys do? >> Well Granite is one of the largest public construction companies in US. It's your publicly traded company, it's actually one of the S&P 500 where the annual revenues are over 2 1/2 billion dollars. And if you see, on the East Coast, if you see Tappan Zee Bridge, that's one of the flagship projects of Granite Construction as an example. Also roads, tunnels, airports, heavy constructions. >> Is that the old Tappan Zee or the new one that's been going up? >> Vladimir: The new one. >> Oh yeah, yeah it looks great. >> Yeah I flew over it last week on my way to Orlando, I said, "Ah that's the new Tappan Zee." >> Looking forward to making it easier to get down to New York City, New Jersey area. >> So yeah, it's one of the flagship projects we're proud of. >> And then your role as a principle architect, tell us about that, and your background there. >> Well, construction industry is not known for over investing in IT. If you look at Gartner's reports, construction industry typically is around 1+% of revenue, and that's where Granite is. So when the new team took over IT, there was an org change, we inherited a lot of technical debt. And that was, plus expiring our lease on the data center, which was actually going to be closed down by a major vendor, and we had to move it very quickly. >> Okay so you come to a show like VeeamON to learn from your peers, figure out best practices. I mean that's what you hear from people, but what's the event been like for you? What's the conversation been like and where are you focused? >> Well, we chose Veeam as a partner, technology partner, for a number of, I believe, good reasons. So one of the motivations for me to come here was to establish better contacts with Veeam organization, also I realized that the technical depth here is, I would say, superior to many other events I had attended, so I was really searching for that depth. As well as the right contacts, because we are right outside of the Silicon Valley, so we're actually doing forward looking things, I can give you some examples. >> Dave: Please, yeah. >> We were site number 141 for the SDN implementation using Cisco ACI as an example. We are a proud customer of ServiceNow. >> I was there last week, and ServiceNow knowledge. >> That's right, actually I did go to Orlando. And well we also, HP is our preferred vendor so all of them are present in this form and some of the announcements, I really had a good fortune to hear first hand, actually make our life easier now. >> So anytime I hear of a ServiceNow customer, I know they've been through some kind of transformation and when you talked about technical debt, and I'm inferring that you've modernized some of your infrastructure, that's a big part of what you have to do as IT architect. Can you talk about that, first of all is that correct? And what did you have to do to achieve that? >> Well as a team we had to, as I mentioned, repay a lot of technical debt in a short period of time. And move our data center, but our main data center is just it, is just one data center. Granite is operational from coast to coast, we have more than 40 regional and branch sites, they have their own computer installations, computer rooms or mini data centers. We have 120, depending on the time of year and the volume of business, of construction sites which are also IT sites. So even the scale of that operation is a challenge. >> Val, with so many locations, can you speak to the impact that Veeam has with what you're doing both operationally and just in general? >> Sure, again in this reasonably short period of time, Veeam helped us as a tool to enable Veeam level backups, coz we had to virtualize very quickly and then move over the wire from the old data center with the expiring lease, lease expiration was really like, surprise, for the new team so the new data center at AT&T, (mumbles) Veeam was there as a backup tool to secure the baseline for the main data center. The main data center is VMware, so Veeam apparently has great name in the VMware community but then the field is pure Microsoft, and with Hyper-V Veeam was there right on time with support for pure Microsoft environment so that's what enabled our field, securing the basis for the field which we didn't have any backup standards, we couldn't get full control of our data, the ownership, the governance was not there, the backups were disjointed so at this point when we nailed what I started referring to as Veeam on the ground, we have that baseline. And here on the show floor I made contacts with the Veeam partner, who actually can look at the Veeam backups, analyze them and it's a low cost answer for us, to really better understand the dark data we inherited. Some of that might be backups of the old backups of the old backups, some of it may have PII. Again it's one extra benefit of attending the show was establishing contacts with the partners who actually complement the Veeam solution. Frankly getting this information of the field is more of a challenge, especially if or when we deal with very good resellers and partners Veeam has but there is always a delay getting this information first hand, expedite things. >> Alright Val, we're out of time so thank you very much for coming to theCUBE, appreciate it >> My pleasure. >> Good to meet you. Alright keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman live from VeeamON 2017, we'll be right back.

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans. It's the CUBE, covering VeeamON 2017 brought to you by themes. >> We're back, day two for the CUBE. We're here at VeeamON in New Orleans. The CUBE is the leader in live tech coverage and this is VeeamON 2017. A lot of cloud talk going on here. We're going to keep the cloud discussion going. Matt Kalmenson is here as the vice president of North American sales for cloud service providers. Great to see you Matt, thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you for having me and great to see you again as well. >> Yes, so I said a lot of talk on cloud. I mean you guys are really focused on that as sort of the next wave of innovation beyond virtualization. So give us the update from your perspective in terms of what you're seeing from your constituents. >> Yeah, absolutely. While today at the Veeam conference at VeeamON it was cloud day. We really like to say everyday is cloud day. >> Dave: Hear, hear. >> Yeah, exactly, and if you think about our business. It's going to continue to grow and it's going to continue to grow as the cloud grows, and as the leader for the Veeam Cloud and Service Provider business in North America. As our business grows, our service provider business is absolutely just going to grow in tandem with them. Everything we're doing is gearing up so that our service providers can be apart of our exponential growth. >> Could you just give us little color, those 18,000 service providers. Global reach, the breath and depth of the partners that you have. >> Absolutely when you think about the service provider community, it's really a broad topic. It's really a broad topic, meaning it's not just back up as a service. It's back up as a service. It could be disaster recovery as a service. There are those that provide complete infrastructure as a service and I can go on and on. Right that means talking about companies that are offering software as a service and how do they back up their customer's data. So again anything that's provided as a service really falls under our Veeam Cloud and Service Provider business. And if you think about the numbers that we've been talking about today in one of the keynote speeches we heard that IDC is saying that by 2020. So what's that's 2 1/2 years away, some 48% of all IT spend is going to be in the cloud. That's just tremendous opportunity. If you look at AWS, who last year I believe announced earning somewhere of around $10 billion. Just a handful of years ago that was close to zero and you see the exponential growth of Azure, and the reality is not any one cloud, even though we're seeing this exponential growth across all of these different platforms. There isn't any one cloud model or cloud provider that's going to be right for everybody. So that's when it comes back to 18,000 cloud providers across the globe that are offering various services to meet the demands of the marketplace, no matter what those demands might be. >> So interesting, what if we stand up for a minute. So not only is AWS growing, mediocre rates. 30%, 50% a year nor to 10 billion. But their operating profits are enormous. Their non-gap operating profits, depending on what quarter, is in their low 30s. When EMC was a public company, their operating profits were half that. So here's AWS extensively supposedly cutting prices, but their driving huge margins. So my question is when your customers see that, the cloud service providers that you're servicing. When they see that, how do they respond? Do they say okay, we're cool because we're differentiating. We got to keep ahead of the market. Have to stay ahead of AWS, do things differently. We heard some of the folks that you worked it, in the earliest day we focused on high touch service. Others focused on specialized DR, what are you hearing from that base? >> Just about anything and everything you can imagine. So it's a really great question 'cause when you think about the cloud very often we think about the change in technology. It's much more than just a change in technology. It's a change in the entire marketplace. This is a monumental shift in not only technology but in consumption models as well. And that consumption model changes all the way through the ecosystem and if you think about it. We have end consumers who are saying how do I consume technology today. Do I buy on prim, do I buy in the cloud? Is there a mix? Do I pay CapEx, do I pay OpEx? Then if you think about those that service that end user community. Resellers and the teams that I'm responsible for that are cloud service providers. They're offering some mix of those types of services. They sell on prim, they might sell in the cloud. They might sell on a hybrid cloud. So they're starting to see and then even us as a manufacturer. We start to see monumental shifts from, do we sell all on prim, all in the cloud or somewhere in between. So we're starting to see that it's really important that you understand what's the customer's consumption model. What's their business desire and then by default our service providers will either have the right model for them or our end customers will find other service providers that do. So what a lot of organizations are seeing today is as they transition a lot from on prim to this cloud model is a change in operating models completely to a monthly recurring revenue model. So when they see that model while they want to really accelerate that monthly recurring revenue model which will often increase margins over the long term. There still has to be that balance between providing exactly what that customer wants no matter where they are along that cloud journey. >> Yes so Pat Gelsinger famous CUBE quote is "If you don't ride the waves, "you're going to end up drift wood." And so in the last five years, a lot of the cloud service providers that you're working with have had to shift their business models. Find new ways of driving revenue and value, and one of those was creating these on going streams of revenue. >> Absolutely. >> How do you see, so I'm always fascinated by a company like Veeam, a software company that can help a cloud service provider essentially monetize their services and create these new ratable business models. How does Veeam do that? >> It's a great question and it's one of the great things about working at Veeam. I'm here representing the Veeam sales team for our cloud and service provider business. And I have a team behind me that supports our 18,000. I'm responsible for North America, so a subset of those 18,000. The reality is everybody in the organization is lined up to support and sell with or through those service providers. So I have the luxury of representing this vast community of Veeam cloud and service provider community. But the reality is we have compensation models in place that allow what I would consider my traditional sellers to receive the benefit if their customers decide to choose a cloud platform and buy through one of our service providers. They still get compensated. As a matter of fact they get compensated in a very rich manner. We have some incentive so that they can be agnostic when they go into a customer. We have the best solution in the industry. You consume any way you want. That's just one way, that doesn't even touch upon the marketing support that we give these organizations. >> How the heck do you support 18,000 partners like that? How do you give them, I mean everybody we've talked to is like, "Oh we love working with Veeam. They're unbelievable. How do you do it? How are you able to at that scale give that level of service? >> It's not any one group or any one that's really providing the focal point of that service, so we have lots of service providers that have very niche businesses. So they might be rather small organizations that we service through what we call our aggregation community. The Insights of the world, the Ingram Micros of the world. They service our providers. We also have extensive inside sales organizations that service our providers. On top of that we have field sales people that service our providers. But I also go back to not only do we have the sales team to back them up but we have this partner ecosystem, our aggregators and we also have rock solid technology, which a lot of times will make our jobs a little bit easier. Meaning if a customer, in this case a service provider can download a copy of our software and turn up a business. It takes a little bit of the burden of day to day management of working with that service provider. And it allows them to get to a revenue stream, time to value shorten and they become profitable quicker. Now again, it's not just my team. It's also our direct sales team who has benefits in seeing our service providers be successful so they're willing to chip in. Our channel community which I'm sure you know, many know it's a very extensive channel community. We have programs to tie together channel and VCS paving cloud service providers ecosystems. So then we leverage the whole channel team which also has a vested interest in the success. So I can't answer that question with one or two bullets. I look at it as product, dedicated teams, extended teams and compensation models which gives everyone the mindset. We have to make this work for our communities. >> Matt you've been a service provider yourself. >> Matt: I have. >> You worked at one before you joined Veeam. Wonder if you could give us a little bit of insights just the state of mind of service providers today. I think back, we know service providers have to keep cost tight because they need to pass that through to their customers. There's such a diverse ecosystem out there. There's big pressure from the public clouds. Where's state of mind with them? What are they excited about? What are they worried about? >> What are they excited about and what are they worried about? As was mentioned in Peter McKay's keynote here at VeeamON. It's the best of times, it's the worst of times. So what are they excited about? They're excited about everything. How can you talk about a marketplace like all cloud or 48% of IT budgets are going to be spent in the cloud. How could you not get excited about that if you're a cloud provider? If you look at Veeam's own growth in the cloud. 60% quarter on quarter comparative growth. Phenomenal growth and so those are things we're all excited about. You think about the announcements we heard today. We heard about the AWS announcement and some tighter integration what I would consider the hyper scale public clouds. Phenomenal things to always get excited about because those create opportunity. What are they concerned about? When we start to have more integration into public cloud offerings, some of the smaller service providers might really be thinking, "Well what does that mean to me?" What is the next revolution within this industry and is that going to leave me in the lurch? How do I compete with all these other service providers that are coming up market? And the way I like to really look at that and what we tend to do to put their mind at ease is remind them the best of times and the worst of times. What we have to do is stay ahead of the curve and one of the way we stay ahead of the curve is by making sure we understand there's always choice and that's the key. That there's always choice, meaning a service provider continues to evolve their business to make sure that they have some of their own cloud services, if that makes sense for them. They also can leverage and provide services on top of let's say an AWS or an Azure. So there's lots of flexibility and nimbleness in our program that no matter what our customers want or you as a service provider want to become. There's lots of different ways to skin the cat, for lack of a better way to put it. To take advantage of the best of times and hedge against what might be viewed as the worst of times. >> You've mentioned the public cloud and how that interaction fits. Definitely what we hear and was talked about this week a lot is that multi-cloud environment that customers have. Veeam's going to spend virtual and physical on premises to sass into public cloud. It felt a little hazy the last few years to try to get to that kind of hybrid multi-cloud. Do service providers feel they understand where they fit? Obviously there's the competitive dynamics but what services they offer. Things like Azure could be a natural extension for many pieces. Amazon might be a little bit more competitive for some but it's that give and take as opposed to it use to be. Dave give a Pat Gelsinger quote, there was the VMware quote like when the book seller wins, we all lose. Do they understand the competitive dynamics little more and willing to partner, understand what they do and what is some other services can fit? >> I firmly believe that the industry is maturing. Our service providers community is really maturing and they're learning how to build what I would call or what you may have heard as a coopetition type of environment. And they have to in order to survive and the reality is, I think back to the mainframe days when we use to read articles about the last mainframe being plugged by the year 2000. We all know that hasn't happened. Tremendous workloads being run on mainframes. You kind of look at it as similar dynamic. I'm not so sure we're ever going to go to an environment where everything's a hundred percent cloud but it probably be somewhere in the 33,33,33. 33% being on prim and staying on prim for various reasons. Maybe it's another third or somewhere in that ball park being in a complete public cloud, hyperscale public cloud because they need some flexibility and nimbleness that they might not get elsewhere. And then another third or somewhere in that ballpark staying in a fully managed cloud environment, because customers still want a very local field perhaps. Maybe they want somebody who can help them. Then they pick up the phone and they know their business intimately, and they're more of a hands-on type of environment. And I think as our business progresses, as the industry progresses becoming much more, much more collaborative. Realizing that some of the people I view as perhaps my biggest challengers can also be my biggest friends. >> So Matt it's definitely a decade of the cloud here. Last question, the bumper sticker on VeeamON 2017 for you. >> The bumper sticker for VeeamON 2017, great question. Would be the cloud is here and Veeam is ready to provide availability for the cloud, in any way, shape or form that it comes. >> Dave: Matt, thanks very much for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Good stuff, alright you're welcome. Alright, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. It's the CUBE, we're live from New Orleans. VeeamON 2017. (techno music) (typing and swirling sound)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCube. Covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back at VeeamON, Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Marc Crespi is here, he's the vice president of SEs at Exagrid Systems, big partner of Veeam's, big presence on the show floor here. Mark, thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So what's doing with Exagrid, we were talking off camera, kind of know you guys a little bit, you guys are right around the corner from us in Massachusetts, but give us the update in the company and what's new? >> Yeah, be happy to. So, first I'd like to thank Veeam for putting on a terrific show, and it's great to be in the beautiful city of New Orleans with you guys. So, if you look at the Exagrid business, Exagrid is a leader in disbase backup with data deduplication business. And we've been a Veeam partner for a decade now, and right from the early days when we started talking and working with Veeam, we realized that our two architectures had a natural fit. So when we talked to joint Veeam customers, whether they're new customers or existing customers, they're experiencing an exponential benefit over just using Veeam with some other disk player as result. If you look at how our business has evolved over the last decade or so, we were originally in the tape replacement business, you know, the dinosaur tape libraries that were still roaming the earth back then, and what we find now is, a lot of customers have moved on from tape, tape is a minority of the backup storage media that we see in the market today. And most of our business in fact is replacing other disk based implementations, either with or without native data deduplication, about 80% of our business now. And it's all the names you hear in the disk based backup with data deduplication market that we're replacing. We've also grown from a company that initially focused on midsized enterprise to now an enterprise class built product and company. So if you look at our average sale, our average customer size, it has grown exponentially over the past several years. And our sales force has grown over 500% just in the last two to three years itself, so we're in a high growth mode, we're experiencing a lot of success and much of our business is, a significant portion of our business is working with either existing or new Veeam customers. >> And a lot of the growth is coming from replacing existing, what's generally referred to as purpose built backup appliances, is that correct? >> That is correct, and the reason that we're seeing that phenomenon is when we sat down and created our architecture, we looked at the legacy of tape and what was wrong with tape. Well tape wasn't very mechanical, it was unreliable, but it also suffered from a vicious cycle of grow, break, replace. So, all our customer data is growing 20, 30% a year, which means your data's doubling every 2.5 to three years. And whatever you're backing up to, you're going to outgrow it. And you're going to ultimately have to replace it in its entirety. And you've got those precious IT budget dollars that you'd like to spend on other initiatives, and you're rebuying your backup storage just to tread water before you even get around to spending on the expansion. So we said that problem needs to be eliminated entirely, and the only way you can eliminate that problem, is by having a highly scalable architecture that never requires forklift upgrade. So if you look at our technology and why we're able to replace incumbent vendors, we're typically finding a frustrated customer who's been through two or three forced refreshes, either 'cause they outgrew technology or the vendor forced them to to outgrow technology by end of lifing et cetera, which we don't do, we don't end of life any of our products, and therefore they lift their head to say, well before I just spend all these dollars again, plus expansion, why don't I go back into the market and see if anyones figured out a better way to do this, and that's where we come in. We come in and show them that you can start with the footprint you need and then you can expand infinitely and we're never going to force you to buy what you already own, so, it marries up much more closely with the lifespan customer customers want for backup storage than the lifespan vendors want for back up storage. >> Marc, can you unpack that a little bit for us, I think about VM where it was an example of how we avoided having to do certain upgrades. I think of operating systems, or servers that were end of life, stick it into VM, I could grow and expand, but when I think about Gear, there's all sorts of reasons why just the exponential growth of, you know, different media types, different sizes that we need to take, that how come you can do this, while others, you know, force those upgrades. >> That's a great question, so I'd compare and contrast a little bit with virtualization, what virtualization brought to the table was, it allowed you to take a set of computing resources and make sure it was fully utilized, right, so if you had a server, you were running one application on it, maybe it was only 30% utilized, you had spare storage, you had spare compute, so what virtualization allowed you to do was add applications that were segmented, and therefore they could run without conflict and you could get that hardware fully utilized. This is a little bit different in that, if you think about what backup really is, on a nightly or weekly basis, even with some of the modern backup techniques that have come out, customers are moving large amounts of data, and it has to be within a certain window of time, because they don't want backups running during productions hours, because that can impact network performance, server performance, et cetera. The other side of the equation is when they want something back they want it back fast. So in order to achieve that, we made two architectural differences, on a scalability side, we said that the legacy storage architectures that typically, utilize a fixed amount of compute, and then expand by simply adding storage, missed the point that when you add workload to a system, but you don't add power to that system, performance at the same time, everything that system does is going to take longer. So, if I have a certain amount of data, and I have a certain amount of compute, and then I double my data, but I don't double my compute, my memory and my networking, naturally everything that system's doing going to take twice as long. So we recognized that you needed a grid based architecture, or a cluster based architecture, that said, when my data doubles, I'll double the storage, but I'm also going to double the compute, the network, the memory, et cetera, at the same time. So if I have a very short backup window day one, with an Exagrid implementation, and my data doubles, I have that very same backup window, I have the very same recovery time. I have the very same replication time, all the things that a disk based backup appliance do, grow linearly with Exagrid. >> And you're saying other architectures had to wait for intel? >> That's a great point, yes, they rely very much on the compute. Now there's implementations where Flash is being added to try and speed up processes, et cetera, which sounds like a great idea, 'cause Flash is obviously a very useful technology in the storage industry, but when you look at the pricing of backup infrastructure, Flash breaks the model for that, for backup infrastructure. It makes the products more expensive and its unnecessary if you implement things correctly. >> Because FAT Disk is still cheaper than cheap Flash, is that right? >> Spinning disk is still about a sixth to an eighth the cost of Flash. >> Now, I wonder if can go back, I want to pick your technical brain for a minute. So you mentioned tape replacement, and then, as I recall the ascendancy of we can call them purpose built backup appliances, I think it's an IDC term or whatever, but we'll use that. A big part of the value proposition was plugging directly, looking like tape, so you didn't have to rip and replace your processes, and I remember Avomar was trying to convince the market that no, you have to change your processes, and people were like, conceptually that sounds good, but its too disruptive for me, so where were you guys on that curve? Do you look like tape, are you easy to pop in or? >> Proud to say we look nothing like tape. >> Okay, so that was a head wind for you early on, right? But it's really benefited you down the road, is that fair to say? >> If it was a head wind, it was a breeze, okay, and what I mean by that is, the technology we're referring to is VTL, Virtual Type Library, and in the very early days of the market, there were some legacy environments typically Fibersand type environments, where you had to make your disk look like tape so that the customer could transition, especially larger customers where, you know, change is harder, radical change is harder to make quickly. So VTL provided a sort of bridge, or transition technology over a period of time. We're through that phase of the market. >> Dave: But it was a band aide? >> It was very much a band aide. >> But you say it was a breeze, but Data Domaine got two thirds of the market, so, I mean... >> Yeah, but it wasn't because of their VTL. >> Dave: It wasn't. >> No, that was a result of there were still some Fiber environments out there, and they decided to cover that part of the market. We looked at the percentage of the market that we thought would need that, both in the early days but more, even more forward looking, you know, everything about our architecture is quite a bit more forward looking than the people we're competing against. And we realized that the investment it would take to do that, would eventually be wasted because it would go away, and heres why, if you look at what Veeam's software does with instant VM recovery and synthetic fulls and, sureback, and virtual lab, et cetera, when you make a disk look like tape, you lock yourself into the Fred Flinstone era of backup. In other words, you can't take advantage of any of the advanced features in that software, because tape couldn't support those features. And as far as the software knows, it thinks it's talking to a tape library, so it's doing silly things like saying fast forward, rewind, eject with disk. If you think about it, you can almost do a stand up set. >> Dave: Hey, your sequential... >> You know, picking on this, right. So what we said is, that's going to go away, it's very clear with what the software folks are doing, especially Veeam, that that's going to go away. Now, I realize Veeam recently added tape capability, but the reason for that is, not because its a primary backup media, it's because for customers that have, you know, infinite retention, or seven, eight, 10 year retention... >> Dave: They need an offsite tape option. >> They need an economic option. It's not that they like it, because we actually have a lot of conversations with customers, even with that longer term retention where they at least want to explore the economics of disk, but in some instances, even though they hate it, and they grin and bare it, they go with tape just purely economically. >> Right, so early days was, hey don't change anything about your software, keep the Fred Flinstone software and all your processes associated with that, and then, of course VM Ware changed everything. >> Marc: Right, and then graduate to the modern... >> Okay, and then the other big, sort of intern scenario, they used to argue about Dedupe rates, and I presume it's the work load and the nature of the data that determines that, not necessarily the technology, but maybe not, maybe there's some nuance on. >> It's a little bit of both. So a responsible deduplication vendor's going to ask the customer a number of questions about the make up and the nature of their data, okay, however, there's also a lot of aspects to which algorithm you use that are going to drive that. So, if you don't implement a very strong aggressive deduplication algorithm, your result is going to be lower, and we find in many of the software based implementations, and some of the appliance vendors, that they took shortcuts on the algorithms itself. Either because they were compute bound or you might be running it on a standard Windows server which is not optimized to run a really strong algorithm, and therefore where, we may say at 12 weeks of retention, you can get about 20 to one, they're getting six or seven to one, and in some cases they're recommending just put straight disk behind the software, well you end up with disk sprawl, because you're keeping all of this retention but you're not reducing the data enough, so you've got disk everywhere. >> Okay, so the quality of the data reduction algorithms matter, okay, and then the other arguments used to be inline or post process, Frank Luptin used "Oh that crappy post process..." >> Marc: I don't remember when he said that. >> Yeah, and weigh in on that. >> So, we kind of agree. Not that inline is better but that parallelization is better so we actually invented a third way called Adaptive Deduplication. Which basically, what that does is, it allows the chunks of data to land into our box first, and then we begin deduplicating, and replicating and parallel, right. So, we're doing it at the same time, but we're not doing it inline. And we monitor utilization of the system and we favor the backup window, so if think our deduplication is going to slow the back window down, we throttle back a bit. If we have plenty of resources, we crank away at the deduplication and replication. So we eliminated the potential drawbacks of post process, we eliminated the potential drawbacks of inline, and the biggest drawback of inline is that, when you go to recover a system and you think about Veeam's instant VM recovery, if you boot a virtual machine, we have that virtual machine in its entirety in a high speed cache, so it's up in seconds. So I was talking to a customer of ours at our booth who recovered an exchange server recently by booting it off of a Exagrid in about five minutes, right. If you tried to do that out of a dedupe, a device that only has inline deduplicative data, you're looking at hours to maybe even a day. Now you're CEO's not going to be too happy when they can't do email for a day, so I would recommend a high speed cache. >> Marc, Exagrid's been a partner with Veeam for a lot of this journey that Veeam's been on for the last 10 years. Here at the show, they've been talking about where the next 10 years are going, everything cloud, and expanding what they're doing, as you look forward, any announcements this week or as you look forward as a partnership, where do you see things growing? >> We don't have any specific announcements this week, I would refer folks to our website, we just recently announced our 5.0 release, it includes some pretty important things. One of the things it includes is, integration with Veeam's scale out backup repository, which dramatically simplifies the use of multiple Veeam repository's with Veeam's software. We also announced an offering for AWS we think that's appropriate for some customers, not all necessarily, where we can put a virtual appliance on Amazon, and in the cloud realm, there's no question that customers are going to continue to explore the cloud model for both efficiency, operational, expense versus capital, but there's going to be multiple cloud models, for example we partnered with a company, who's here, who you may have spoken to Offsite Data Sync. So if the customer doesn't want to do Amazon for some reason, then Offsite Data Sync will offer them the very same service with Exagrid technology and an operational expense model. And they've been a very good partner of ours as well. >> And the virtual appliance in AWS how does that work? You pop it in a COLO facility or? >> No, you literally, you load it into Amazon like you would any other Amazon machine instance, and it behaves just like a second data center. So you replicate to it, and it can store all of your offsite data, and then when you need it back, you can recover it provided bandwidth is adequate. >> So, I access the instance from the AWS marketplace, or? >> No, we actually provide it directly. >> Oh, okay. >> Through reseller network. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I appreciate you by the way taking me down memory lane and sort of educating us on... >> Marc: Love talking about this stuff. >> Now, so, a lot of things we talked about are old news, to sort of set the context. Where are we today, what is the state of the market and the competitive differentiators that customers really care about? >> I think that we're at the state of the market where people are frustrated with a lot of legacy approaches, whether it's on the backup software side or the backup storage side. The licensing models are expensive, the vendors are gouging them, because they're trying to keep revenue, and they're worried about, you know, the players that are becoming the replacement players like Veeam, like Exagrid. So we're at point now where I see more activity of customers looking for alternatives to what they're running today than maybe in history of backup. You know, people always used to say, backup apps are very sticky, they're very hard to replace, well, look at what Veeam's been able to accomplish. Backup storage is very hard to replace, once it's installed. Well if you force a customer every three years to respend the money they already spent, plus more, you're creating a vent where that customers going to get frustrated and they're going to go out and look at alternatives. So I think we're at a point now where more so than ever, customers are looking for alternatives that stop the madness of backup spending, and stop the madness of backup performance degradation. >> Yeah, we had Dave Russel on yesterday and in his last magic quadrant, you probably read it, I think one of his strategic planning assumptions was 50% of the customers out there are going to replace or sunset their existing backup architecture in the next two years. I mean, that's a massive number, so, and obviously a huge opportunity for you and for Veeam. >> Yeah, I'm honored to be talking to Dave later today. >> Well Marc, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCube, it was really a pleasure. >> Thank you guys, it's been fun. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE covering VeeamOn 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VeeamOn in New Orleans, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host for the week, Stu Miniman. We're going to talk cloud service providers. Cloud is obviously a very hot topic this week at VeeamOn. Matt Chesterton is here. He's the CEO of OffsideDataSync and he's joined by William Bell who's the vice president of production development for cloud and enterprise services at PhoenixNAP. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> So, let's start. What's happening at VeeamOn? You heard what I said about, you know, cloud seems to be a major theme here. What are you guys seeing this week? >> We're seeing the same thing. So today is officially cloud day at VeeamOn and some great announcements that are going on so new product announcements with B10, so we're excited about that. >> William, anything you'd add? >> Yeah, I mean, the general session this morning covered so much around cloud and what's that's going to mean to the end user at Veeam. Right, and how the ecosystem is being built and working both with the hyper-scalers and guys like us. >> So, so much talk in the industry about the big, really the big three. Maybe you throw a China cloud in there, a Japan cloud in there, how is it that folks like you all can differentiate from the likes of AWS and Azure and Google. Maybe you can start, Bill, and share with us. >> Yeah, sure, and service. I think that's really the key is that customers need a help. >> Dave: You mean I could talk to you? >> You could talk to me. We can actually help you achieve an outcome that you're looking for with your business. That's not something that you're going to get from a hyper-scaler, period. >> You don't have a little device I can put in my house that I talk to instead? >> No, no new devices, no books, no operating systems to install, just help. >> So your value property is really high-touch. >> High-touch, high-touch for us, it's high-touch global, right? So we can help you do the same things that you're trying to accomplish anywhere in the world talking to the same people, alright? And that's our kind of commitment. >> And yet you've also got infrastructure behind that. >> William: We do. >> So why wouldn't you, for example, could a viable strategy be, say, I'll put that high-touch in front of AWS or Azure? Why not? >> Well, for us, it really comes down to margins, right? At the end of the day, it's that we derive margin from infrastructure just the same way we do from the service angle of that. So if it's only service and there's no margin on the infrastructure it's a tougher business to scale, right? We also can capture markets that are uncapturable. This isn't a cloud business for us, right? We're data center owner-operators. We're doing things that customers need that are not cloud-centric. >> How about you guys, Matt? Little different story here. You guys are more specialized. >> Yeah, little bit, little bit different. So service is always important. We've taken the approach with the public clouds of kind of going with the tide. So layering products and services that go with that. Example, today or yesterday, I think it was announced with the scale-up backup repositories being integrated with storage like Glacier. I'm sure there's a product plan there for a service provider like us so that we can offer that as a service, too. So kind of taking that momentum and working with it. So integrating with what's already going on. It's going to be a tough tide to fight if we don't kind of direct it in the way we want, so we're kind of taking that and going in the direction of how can we use it and how can we benefit from it. >> Matt, can you build on that Veeam as a partner. I think it was Peter McKay told us 30% of their business is to the, you know, thousands and thousands of service providers they have. You know, where do you find opportunity, products, growth when it comes to Veeam? >> Good question, Stu. What Veeam's doing, they make it very easy for us as partners, in the cloud of course, so that when something's delivered, they make a cloud available, as well. So as you can see, users of Veeam can direct their backups and archives to the cloud, private, public, but they've also made that available and are going to make that available for us so they're a great partner. They always think about cloud and cloud first so they don't just develop a product that can be used in and around service providers but that we can take and capitalize from it as well. >> William, what I want to add on there, you're also a VMware partner. Maybe tell us what it's like being a VMware and Veeam and do you go beyond the VMware piece too with Veeam or? >> Yeah, so I mean, in Veeam's ecosystem, VMware and Microsoft are very important to both of them, right? And because of where Veeam started, hyper-V's a large part of their business and growing still very rapidly part of their business, right? And so we're forced to address both sides of that. When we go to build our own infrastructure, when we're going to offer our own services, we've made a commitment to VMware today, right? And we're building services around that ecosystem including the stuff that's happening with Veeam. But let me talk about Veeam as a partner, right? Veeam has been singularly the best manufacturer partner that we've worked with up until this point. Maybe it doesn't mean that somebody else maybe not tomorrow, but at least up until this point, they've help both of our businesses really grow. >> Matt: I couldn't agree more. >> And grow in branding and grow in product diversity and grow all over the place. >> Explain that more. >> Is it simplicity? Is it pricing? Is it, you know, community? >> It's their dedication to us as a partner. So you hear of partner relationships in the community. Veeam has taken it to a new level. They're truly a partner with us. They care about how our business is doing and how they can develop us and how they can find out what we don't have experience with and then help us. So design a program or introduce us to the right folks or make the right alliance relationships. So they genuinely look at it >> So are they a channel for you or are you a channel for them? >> William: Both. >> Yeah, sometimes you don't know. The lines are not exactly clear. And that's good. >> Yeah, I think that those unclear lines means an increase in all kinds of things for both of our companies mutually, right? We're here. We started together in this Veeam ecosystem, you know, three and a half years ago I guess now, and you know, as the first five service providers that were teamed up with Veeam, and we're also both standing here with gigantic platinum sponsorships at their show because it's become that important to us and our business. >> And you guys, I mean, you sell to, your customers are doing everything. They got one of everything in their floor. They're, I'm sure, diverse. You've seen a bunch of folks on stage this week. We saw Microsoft today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We saw Cisco yesterday. What kind of relationships do you have with the big whales? >> So we align very well with Cisco. In fact, that's what we power our networks with, and we use their Cisco UCS series for everything we power in our data centers, too. So it's great to see them here and interact with the team. They're a great partner for us. >> And HP Nimble Storage is our other clear-cut top partner, right, in this ecosystem. And there's a great marriage there, both on the integration side, but from a powering these Veeam powered cloud services like offsite backup and Zas recovery requires a lot of storage, right, to take that data in and hold it and replicate it and do things with it. And so our partnership with HP Nimble's large. 6- In some of the expansion that we're seeing Veeam talk about, the kind of new ten years where they're going, some of that is as a service. How do they talk about that dynamic of potentially being a competitor now to the 18,000 great partners that they've had? >> You know, I think a lot of it's got up in a bit of semantics problems, right, semantic issues. Veeam is doing a lot of things that are going to enable services and as a service, I don't see them building solutions that would compete, right? They have a great example of what it looks like to do that with vCloud Air being such a VMware-centric partnership, that was a headwind that they were unable to overcome even the size of VMware, right, going out and building and being a service provider and building an infrastructure service, trying to take their software company and become a service provider, it doesn't work. The same for us, I'm not going to go start building backup software. (laughs) >> So, if you think about the mega phases of cloud. We've been doing this for a long time, and I think back to the early VMworlds that we did, we had so much discussion around cloud, and back in the early days, it was kind of, you know, after Amazon announced AWS and cloud sort of got coined, it was an experiment, it was for startups, and that was pretty clear. And then in sort of 2008 when the economy tanked, a lot of CFOs said, "All right, shift capex to opex." And that was sort of the next phase. And then coming out of the downturn, a lot of lines of business said, "Hey, we got cash. We need speed. Let's go," and started to invest. And then after that IT sort of embraced it. And now seems to be whatever term you want to use, cloud broker or just, they've sort of captured a religion in a nut to hang it onto lun provisioning anymore as a practice. Now I'm wondering if that is a reflection of your world or because you in your case are specialists and you guys are more service oriented, did you ride those waves, was it different ways. Maybe William we can start with you. >> So, our first product line was a 250,000 square foot facility in Phoenix, Arizona, right? Building a kolo, a network access point, that's the heritage of the PhoenixNAP, right, the name, and so we were relying on capex. People to go in and buy equipment and stick it in our facility. Everyone had already decided they didn't want to build data centers. Right, in 2010, everyone's like, "You know what, ten million dollars to get my data room up? No thanks." Right? But they were committed to buying hardware. And we took advantage of that and grew that business and we started to address the opex side in 2012 kind of moving forward. At least we believe we're prime positioned because at the end of the day, it's going to be both. All opex is not the answer, right? I truly believe that. And that's part of that hybrid story, as well. >> And Matt, what about you guys? Again, being specialists in all kinds of things, DR, recovery, etc, did you take a different journey? >> Yeah, Dave, we did. And I heard the term even this week, born in the cloud. If it makes sense, we're a cloud company that had that vision from the beginning. So we didn't build a facility, but that's certainly what we do, leverage space power bandwidth that we partner with Switch and Supernet facilities for our data centers. And we believe that customers are and will continue to move into the opex model into the cloud, so both production work loads and DRAs backup as well. It's interesting to see that mix, too, especially as things from Veeam are announced that really becomes one. So the workloads of DRAs are soon within, you know, 15 minutes or 15 seconds can become a production work load. So if customers aren't necessarily moving their infrastructure to the cloud, it's going to happen one way or the other, whether it's the model of they don't want to purchase hardware any longer or they've had some sort of failure, disaster, and they're going to move that way. >> I want to let you speak a little bit more about your customers. There was a great line, I thought, from Mark Russinovich which said that the C-suite doesn't come asking for infrastructure as a service, they want to figure out how to take their business to the next level. Where are you customers in that kind of cloud strategy and how are you helping them along that journey? >> We have a discussion with them. We try to understand what their business objectives are and what they're trying to achieve by either pushing to the cloud or understanding what the cloud is. And there's a spectrum there from as I mentioned before, backup, disaster recovery as a service, infrastructure as a service, and not all things line up to one single service or way you can put it in the cloud. So we try to understand what their business objectives are and say, "It's going to make the most sense to put some of the work load in the cloud, but some applications stay onsite and you have DRAs replication to get them offsite." So really engaging and understanding what their business needs are and getting under the hood of what they're trying to achieve. >> Yeah, I think that at the end of the day, we are focused on a hybrid future. We truly believe that customers will search for the cloud experience, the business optimization for a period of time where they're saying, "You know what? I don't care. I want this outcome. Go get me this outcome." At some point, it will come back. They will be like, "We have the outcome. How can we optimize this outcome? Are we spending the right amount of money to achieve this outcome?" And the moment they do that, they will find that opex purely and blatantly, if you just say, "I'm all in. I'm always on. I'm only opex." You will spend more money on that over time. If you pick and choose the things that you are incapable of doing or would cost you more to do through capex and staffing, then you can basically position both of those things to maximize value. >> Horses for course, gentlemen, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, 'preciate it. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from VeeamOn 2017. This is theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, it's theCube, covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back at VeeamON 2017 in New Orleans. Andrew Christensen is here. He's a senior systems engineer with the Global Data Centres Study Group, higher ed organization. Andrew, welcome to theCube, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> You're welcome. So interesting name, tell us about the organization. >> Study Group, Study Group began life as a small education college in the UK, about 15 years ago. Over the time, we've grown to a global organization. We take on about 85,000 students a year, from close on 160 countries. We have 85 sites around the world, very much a global footprint, very thin corporate terms and in IT terms. >> Okay, is this your first VeeamOn? >> No, it's not. I came to the previous one in Las Vegas, and that experience meant that I had to come back to this one in New Orleans. >> Really, why? Tell us about that. >> It's a great experience. They know how to do their events very well. The information is first class, and as a Veeam product user the information and the experience, in the room available to you is wonderful. >> How long have you been a Veeam customer? How did you... Tell us about your journey. >> Well, our journey, we were very much in the legacy ballpark of backups. We had some unnamed products that we were using, which were very old school in their thinking and how they did things. We realized quickly that the amount of data that we took on was growing and it was going to outpace our capacity for backup, and the simplicity and complexity was growing too fast for us, couldn't manage it. It wasn't going to be feasible, went to market to start looking for a better solution, and Veeam was top of the list. >> So, you mentioned data growth as one of the catalysts for, which created more problems, obviously for your backup, made it harder meet, maybe it was backup windows at the time, or RPO and RTO. Did your decision to change your backup also coincide with an increase in virtualization? And did that have a ripple effect? Can you explain, we've been talking about that all week, but I'd like to validate it with a practitioner. >> No, spot on there. We virtualized quite early on in the grand scheme of things. We went to VMware very quickly, we're now running Hypervisor with a vShpere 5.5 environment. Now that was a well good, I don't think the practices that we took in and a lot of the infrastructure alongside that kept up with that, backups is one of those things. And when we started looking at what we needed, to really work with our environment, get the most out of our virtualization project, we needed to do something very quickly and backups is a key feature. >> Andrew, as a global organization, how does Cloud fit into your architecture, what you're doing, maybe you can kind of sketch out a little bit for... So we know where Cloud fits. >> Our solution, although quite simple in principle, it's never simple, let's face it, anything IT, especially in the engineering scope guide, never simple. >> Dave: This keeps getting more complicated. >> Exactly right, and you know for better or worse, that's how we do these things, especially when it comes to a Cloud scenario. You add a little bit of complexity, but often it pans out to be worthwhile, especially in dollar value. Our solution takes local backups in a hub and spoke concept, our data center as being the hub, and our branch starts being the spoke, consolidate the data from all the sites, hold a decent amount of data as backup onsite, and then everything else will actually ship out to the Cloud, and that being AWS in Glacier storage. Now that came about mostly because our core data center is in Las Vegas, that we have no hands on site. So we didn't really have the option of a manual tape service, a paid for service, very expensive. So we needed to shift away from your old school, typical tape service environment. Having good bandwidth in Las Vegas, and availability to get to the AWS readings, made it a good solution for us. Our tool to do that, already in place with Veeam, made it very simple. >> So what are you... So your target is Glacier? >> Correct, yes. So long term retention, and legal retention especially, we push everything out to Glacier to fill that need for us. >> And okay, so that's the last thing, maybe I missed it, there's something in between obviously, if you need to do a recovery right? >> Correct, so we keep some local storage as well, depending on the environment and the data itself, we'll keep it locally on site in our racks for a certain amount of time, maybe a year, maybe two years depending on some of the data. Everything else has a duplicate and a long term, goes out to AWS. >> Alright, there were a couple of announcements this week about AWS and also about Glacier. What did you hear? What interests you? >> Well, I mean the V10 announcement and its interaction with AWS, hooking in your AWS accounts to s3 Glacier and what not, very promising, very promising, very excited. I'm going to hit up my account manager for a trial on that very soon, cuz that could simplify our process, and I imagine a lot of other people with hybrid cloud scenarios will leverage it as well. For those people that have work loads in AWS, the agentless backup function, very promising. It's a logical step I think, in the partnership that's built that is very logical as well, it's going to help a lot of people. >> What is driving, in your industry, the availability needs and how has that evolved over the last couple of years? >> Well, it's a catch 22, for us data security is paramount, a student come to us, they sign up for a course, in a lot of cases it'll be an international student. Now that's a well and good, but when we look at the data that we take from that student to get them into a course, it's essentially a how to kit for data theft and identity theft. So we need to protect our data very well, you know, we've got a lot of personal information, we've got passport photos, we've got visa replications, the whole shabang. So being able to make sure that A, it's available to the people that need it, so that they can get them into their courses, get them learning stuff, which is what our ideal is, and making sure it's secure, no matter where we put it, backups, availability, all that sort of stuff, needs to be secure. So a solution then at all has to incorporate that as easily as possible. >> Bill Philbin was asking the audience this morning, have you ever had to do a recovery? He said about a third of the audience's hands went up, presuming your hand was up. >> Yes we have. We've both tested, and we actually had incidents where we've had malware come to the business in certain aspects and having a good recovery point on site, and a quick easy interface, the single pane of glass, to coin a pro word of the moment, was very useful. You know, stops the heart a little bit when it does happen, but after you go through the hoops, and you understand what you're doing with the product, it really does give you a sense of security. >> You know, large organizations, big banks and the money business for example, they have very explicit disaster recovery plans, they might have three site data centers, they get gobs of money they can throw at this stuff. Higher education tends to be, a little tighter with the budget, fair to say, but also a lot of smaller and mid size organizations, I think it's fair to put you in that category, oftentimes had very little, if any, sometimes data... Disaster recovery, and what they've done is when they re-architected the backup, they said, you know we can kill two birds with one stone. And so to bring those two worlds together. Is that what you did? And how would you describe it? >> I'd call our solution a bit of a hybrid, in line with the backup scenario that we do have, both offsite and hybrid cloud scenario, we also do a DR solution internally. So we have a data center in Las Vegas, we also have one in Sydney. So we do take some DR concepts down to Sydney to hold on to that, very limited. Your bang for buck with DR, it's very hard to justify when you go to manage it and say, well you know, the cost of failure needs to be calculated here. It's very difficult to make that argument successfully. So having a tool, that we already used, that could also do that, very helpful in the first place. You're right in that we are an SMB in the traditional sense and the feature set that does come with Veeam, is quite good for that I think. We're quite OPIC shy, as a tradition, so being able to put a little bit of infrastructure in place, and sort of pre-purchase these things, get the cost out of the way, with CapEx, helped us a lot. So, no more licensing involved, Veeam took care of it in house already, and a little bit of expenditure took that solution very well for us. >> Enter one of the interesting discussions we've seen in the last few years when we talk in the education realm is the importance of data and how can you leverage that data? Of course, we talked about some of the security aspects. How has the role of data changed in your world? >> It's a bit of a catch 22. It's recognized that we do take on a lot of data. How we use that, it's an ongoing question. I mean people have put a lot of BA type roles in place to try and leverage that a bit further, get some use out of it. We have this data, it should be an asset to us. It's very difficult to do successfully I think. People don't really know the questions to ask, of their data. You know, maybe there's a bit of thought leadership or some extra disruptive technology that should come along and help that out a little bit. I think in the near future, it will be a very big question there to be answered and a lot of demands can be met by that. >> How about your students? You know, there's got to be, from all the devices, what kind of pressures does that put on the IT role? >> Well, it's substantial, I mean in our particular role, especially in the UK and Europe, we actually house our students. So, everything from living aspects to education whatnot, everything is handled by us. So their safekeeping, or their lifestyle, their quality of life and such. Now, in today's modern age, you now have two iPads, you have a Chromebook, you have an iPhone and whatnot, all that needs to be handled by us in a secure fashion. The data that comes from that, the content that gets delivered to the students, both privately and during their education, it needs to be both readily available and useful. Making it available to the students, as well as protecting them I suppose, in a secure fashion, making sure that the data that they hand out over these networks and use is safe. That's a big concern to us. >> So a lot of talk this week about ransomware of course. A guy in your position, talk about make the heart stop a little bit. How do you look at that problem? What solutions do you have? And what would you like to see the industry do? >> It's a difficult question. There's no easy answer to that at all. Recently we've heard a lot about machine learning and predictive analytics and whatnot. We use some products that do real time assessment of file stores, file usage, and whatnot, and predict excess usage I suppose. All of a sudden you can start seeing if there are extra files being encrypted very quickly. You can take action based on that, so these are a clear sign of ransomware. That said, we educate a lot of young people, we educate a lot of young people in IT as well. We have identified that a key threat is often going to be from internal. How we protect against that has really shifted our mindset a fair bit. A lot more legislation is coming in, in the UK especially, starting to come in in the US and Austral-Asia, and the requirement for that is only going to grow. It's a challenge that I can't really say in the future how we're going to predict it and act on it, but it is always going to be in front of mind. >> Do you think you could use your backup data, because essentially you're pushing change data over the network, you know, constantly, or at least multiple times per day I presume, right. Do you have the tooling to monitor that activity and identify anomalous behavior, where maybe you're pushing more data, or you're seeing more encrypted data going at a particular time. Do the tools exist to do that today? >> To an extent yes, getting them all together, to be viewable and visible data for your technician, your engineers and whatnot is a bit of a challenge I think. Anti-virus and security software is out there that can do this for you. Also, the data analytics tools, they're out there at the moment. VeeamONE is actually a useful tool on that front, can help us out a lot there. Making sure that the person responsible or looking for that trend knows where to go and has a good single pane of glass per say to actually identify issues. I think that's the key. >> Could you... Another, I've been thinking about sort of how to solve this problem. Could you put like phantom files out there in the network? Phantom high value files like, student credit card list. >> Andrew: You mean the honey pot scenario? >> Yeah use it as a honeypot, yeah. >> Absolutely, I mean a lot of the more enterprise size corporations are doing this, and you can actually leverage that, take them on as a service if you need to. There are companies out there that will offer this service to you. It is quite expensive for what it is, and yet when we calculate the cost of failure, I think the expense might be justified. >> Well like you said, it's hard. Your CapEx, CapEx phobic, I forget what you said, but I'll say CapEx phobic, challenged. Okay, we're out of time so the last question. Takeaways from VeeamON 2017, things that you're excited about? >> Once again, the AWS announcements in v10 and the partnerships coming from that, very exciting, very exciting. Looking forward to that, to being able to test it a little bit. The feature set that keeps growing. When we started out in 8.5, then 8.5 went on to 9.5, and the growth from 8.5 to 995 and now 10 on the horizon, it's massive. If they continue this growth it's going to be one of the best products out there. I'm very happy about that. >> Alright Andrew, thanks very much. Appreciate it. >> Thanks very much for having me. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest, right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from VeeamON in New Orleans.

>> Commentator: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam >> We're back, this is theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. We're here at VeeamON 2017 day two. Bill Philbin is here, Senior Vice President at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And runs the storage business for HPE. Great to see you again my friend. >> Hey Dave, it's always good to see you. >> Really? >> Always look so fantastic. >> Thank you, where's the tie? >> There's no tie. >> I will say, you guys, those of you who didn't see it, Bill nailed the Keynote this morning. It was great, it was funny, self deprecating, and genuine. And essentially you resonated with me, 'cause I got four kids and you were talking about how you call your kids, you either get voicemail, or their voicemails full. >> Bill: That's right. >> You text them, at least your kids text you back. I got to Snapchat my kids to get a hold of them. So you got to get into Snapchat >> They have told me that texting and Facebook is so, you know, 20th century Dad. >> You email 'em, right? >> Yeah. >> You get some important email, you send it to 'em. Like, email? What are you kiddin' me? >> No you know it's not in >> Our lives are challenged, but nonetheless, you got some of your challenges of your own. You're running a big business now at HPE. You guys are making some serious moves in the marketplace. Give us the update on the HPE storage business. >> Yeah, so thanks Dave. >> Every squirrel finds a nut in the forest eventually, so I just had a pretty good day today. But, that was because we have a great story, frankly, to tell. And I think you know, as I was saying before, the storage business is changing. Rather dramatically. Now is it, is it self inflicted? Or is it you know, just a a course correction. I actually believe it's self inflicted in a sense that we've taken many of the capabilities that were previously on high end systems. And we brought 'em to the mid range. We've thinned it, we've de-uped it, we've compressed it, We've got it on SSDs. And so the whole business model, now is different than it was five years ago. Before you sold somebody an appliance, you chocked it full of spinning media. They ran out of IOPS, you sold another appliance, you chocked it full. It was a pretty good business model. That's how I kept Mrs. Philbin in the lifestyle she's grown accustomed, right? Well, now, you don't chock it full of spinning media, you chock it full of SSDs. IOPS are always on guarantee. And then you take all that compaction technology, and that has actually forced a fundamental change, I think, in the storage landscape. That we, including Hewlett Packard have inflicted upon ourselves. I think we take a look at that, and need to take a look at the storage landscape, the number of vendors that are out there. You know, I think that is changing as well, which is, you know, part of the reason why we decided to get into acquiring companies like SimpliVity and Nimble. >> Dave: And you've got a knife fight going on in All-Flash. I got to say, you know, what HPE did with 3PAR surprised me and probably a lot of people. >> Bill: Mhm. >> Most people didn't think you could quote, unquote "bolt on" flash into that architecture. Obviously it wasn't a bolt on, you guys have been very successful. When you talk to your competitors, certainly when you talk to customers they love it. When you talk to competitors they say "yeah, we can compete with company A, B, and C. It's 3PAR that we have trouble with. Because it's simple and it works. >> And some times enduring technologies actually extend beyond, you know, single generations, right? And so, we certainly have heard the story about the new versus the old, and being old maybe this is my perspective. But, you know, enduring technologies actually can transition across architectural and technology boundaries. And that's exactly what we've done, exactly what we've done with 3PAR. >> Now, having said that, you guys have been, I mean you saw 3PAR initially with you know, spinning, and hybrid. Took off, you know, justified the acquisition, made the transition to All-Flash >> Bill: Yeah. >> I've called it many times, 3PAR's the gift that keeps on giving. So how many times can you go to that well, right? So you guys have made some moves here. Not the least of which was Nimble, want to talk about that. And SimpliVity, so. Even though SimpliVity's not under your organization, you have an affinity there. Talk about those two moves and where they fit in the portfolio. >> So let's just start with the 3PAR, just the 3PAR comment just for a quick second. The pure plays versus sort of the, what they call the stayed play. So, it's hard to imagine that 3PAR as a stayed play technology, right? I don't agree with that statement. But that, the reason I don't agree with it is, we're actually going faster than the pure plays in the All-Flash market. We have more revenue than they do, so. I think it's comfortable for people to sort of set one technology off over another but the fact of the matter is, that we're growing faster. The other thing about the market is it generally gravitates toward technologies that are unique in purpose regardless of what they cost. Because the customer demands it. And All-Flash started with guys like Fusion-io and Violin Memory, and all of those guys, right? Eventually what happens though, is customers tire of those additional assets in their data center, right? One more thing they don't want in their data centers, is one more thing in their data center. And that's when the big guys eventually sort of overtake that position. So, I think what you're going to, you're starting to see in the storage landscape is compression at a company level, right? You're seeing the Neutonics and Pures out there. You're seeing then the next tier of companies trying to sort of, you know, make the big break. And the last time a company made a big break in the storage business, that's still independent today. It's a billion dollars of revenue or more, was? >> Dave: NetApp. >> NetApp. Because storage looks like it's easy goin' in but it's not easy when you think about bare metal and databases and transactional systems, and highly available. It's not that easy, and so, that's why a company like a Nimble, who has great technology, Infosite, the CASL file system, great people. To order scale that business, profitably, and have to go to market reach, it needs to align themselves with a company like Hewlett Packard. So, we're really, really excited about Nimble joining the family for sure. That now enables us to sort of take the flash portfolio further across the across the landscape. On SimpliVity, I think the way that you should think about our strategy at Hewlett Packard is it's all about choice. So, you're a customer who wants to sort of, you know, put assets in your data center, and have assets in Microsoft as your cloud we should enable that. If you think Software Defined's the right way to go, we should enable that. You have an appliance customer, we should enable that. If you want to co-locate applications in a simple easy to use interface with storage, we have that, that's SimpliVity. But that choice shouldn't come with operational complexity. So, one of the things that we have to do, and I was talking about this at the Keynote, is we have to somewhat hide ourselves behind the application and make it easier for customers to consume. Because that is what the web offers them. We ought to be able to federate the data, so that you can actually move your data around when your requirements change, or you've got to burst. And the administration ought to be really, really simple. So, our strategy around technologies like SimpliVity, or Nimble, or 3PAR, or you know, MSA, XP, is all around giving customers choice without the operational complexity of having lots of things to manage. >> Bill, I guess I'm trying to, for our audience, try to maybe compare and contrast a little bit >> Yeah. >> Against you know, what was formerly EMC, now Dell EMC, >> Uh-huh. >> Which the knock on them for many years has been, they've got so many products, they overlap. We've covered for many years how, you know, if I have 3PAR and some of the other HP, HPE storage products, I can move between them, is that the difference issues thing So even though if you have Nimble, plus SimpliVity, plus you know, 3PAR. >> So, three is less than seven. Let's just start with that answer. And maybe it's not seven anymore, you know, I've lost track. Second, I think if you're really talking about provisioning storage and networking compute from an application layer, really what you've doing is you want to have a conversation about the service level underneath that the storage provides. Maybe for certain applications you're okay with thinly provisioned or not thinly provisioned et cetera. So, one answer is, a lot of those capabilities are actually hidden by the application layer. However, we know that the thing that doesn't move all that well is data. And data has gravity. So, being able to move data in addition to moving your compute, is one of the reasons that they differentiation for us over the other guys. >> Dave: But, you know, let me just stay on that for a second Stu. We're all storage guys or quasi-storage guys. >> Bill: He's only a quasi-storage guy? >> He's really a networking guy. >> I worked at a storage company for ten years but, yeah. >> You're a newbie then. >> But if you look at history, it is shown that you actually have to have multiple architectures to increase the size of your TM, and penetrate the marketplace. I mean, NetApp is the exception that proves the rule. I mean, they could only go so far with WAFL. I mean you were there, and you know, And so even now NetApp makes a move for solid fire. Obviously EMC has been very successful with, I think it's 17, so not 7. But it actually works, and so, that dogma of oh we have to have one architecture is never proven to really be a winning strategy. >> And frankly, it is really hard to actually stress an architecture from top to bottom, right? So I don't disagree with the comment you made, but that is effectively, however the same problem with the storage startups today is if they do a single thing, only support virtualized environments, whatever it is, right. Only support VDI. The breath is what customers are looking for. And if you don't have the breath, or you're forced to go get the breath, by adding bolt-ons to try and get the breath. It's just going to make it very, very difficult for them to survive in the new world order. Both acquisitions SimpliVity and Nimble were great for the company. >> Bill, can you tie together for us HPE and Veeam, how those fit together. One of the big themes we've been covering is the extension of Veeam started very, very much virtualized now they're physical they're talking about all the cloud solutions. Expect there's a lot of fit between your strategies. >> There is, for years we've have a very, very strong technical partnership between the Veeam engineering team and the StoreOnce engineering team. I think, you know, that is like the basis of trust, I think is the best way to think about it. We've both sort of got competing road maps on occasion, but at the end of the day it's all about, sort of, what's best for the customer. Number one is technical people, second is we have the same view of the market. And I talked about this, this morning, which is, this highly available, always on sort of environment is the same story that we tell. So the messages are aligned. The third is that it's complimentary, we have our own sort of data protection technology with data protector. We have our own sort of snapshot management capability with RMC. The question is, how do we sort of you know, protect the entire environment. And Veeam is a critical asset in that. It's a great business partnership, great technology partnership. The fact that our folks kind of resell Veeam, has just launched the business forward . >> Well, the move to sell the software business to Micro Focus has just opened up new partnership opportunities for you guys. >> Bill: In regards to that we still have a very, very strong partnership with the software guys. You know there's, the largest connect that we have on a backup product today, is get a protector. So I don't expect that to change. But there are people who prefer, you know, to use Veeam and we have to support that. >> Dave: Yeah, but still I mean, if you got the your colleagues in data protector and you're out aggressively partnering with Veeam and it's part of HPE. Maybe you get an email or, you get a "hey, come on Bill, you know, give me a break here." And now I feel like you know, the gloves are off you can do independent of all that internal stuff, plumbing. It's what's right for the customer. Maybe I'm overstating that. >> Perhaps a bit, because we'll still have equity ownership in the new company. Again with all the sort of connect I have, I think that regardless of where the paychecks come from if you will, we have to have a really strong partnership with them. And it's no different than, you know, we also have a partnership with Symantec, I mean we have other partnerships that customers just have made a preference around. That we're not going to convince them, you know, to do something different. Therefore, we've got to have a strong partnership. >> Dave: Alright, so we're going to be at Discover, theCUBE will be there for, been there many years now. I think this is our seventh Discover. >> You've been there as many years as I have, >> So what are we looking forward to there. >> So I think there's a bunch of announcements, we've highlighted one of them today around the secondary flash array for Nimble. There's some new 3PAR announcements that are certainly coming. The Synergy guys are going to certainly have a thing or two to say, I'm thinking. Based on the strength of that platform, that platform's really starting to take off. And so I think you're going to see that, I think this will probably be really the first Discover where, you know, you'll start to see, and maybe Madrid Discover will be different. But you'll start to see the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We keep focusing on things that we've spin-merged out, but the thing I think we need to focus on is the fact that we're, this is like a Phoenix of a new company, right? Solely focused on enterprise infrastructure and the customer needs. We've rebranded the TS business and PointNext, which is all around transformation and technology services, so. It's almost like we're starting the clock over again. For the HP employees, we're not changing your service levels. But, for almost everything else, we're rebuilding a brand new company. And that is what Meg and the board are doing, it's really exciting. >> Well, it's true the last couple of Discovers there was a distraction with the split, there was a distraction with two spin-merges. But you've now seen the M&A activity focus on areas like storage, areas like converge, type or converge. >> I always tell this story 'cause you guys like my analogies which is, you know, when you've got lots of kids in your family, my family, my oldest I've got lots of pictures of. The middle kid, you know, some pictures of. The third one virtually no pictures of, right? 'Cause you go from man to man defense, to zone defense. Same is true with a CEO. When you've got seven or eight different things to manage, you're focused, it needs to be spread over seven different or eight things. Now, Meg is actually, got fewer children to manage if you roll the analogy out a little bit. We got a lot of her attention, and a lot of focus. And that I think is really, really important. >> Dave: And now all the pictures are digital, they're in the cloud, they're protected. >> Bill: Yeah. >> Bill, great to see you. >> Good to see you guys. >> Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, we'll see you in Vegas. >> Bill: You bet. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's The Cube covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. (upbeat jingle) >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman and this is The Cube. The Cube is a leader in live tech coverage, and we're here covering VeeamON 2017. This is day two for us. Paul Mattes is here. He's the vice president of The Global Cloud Group at Veeam. Paul, good to see you. >> Hey, great to be here guys. Thanks for having me in. >> You're welcome. Hosting the conference this morning, throwing Peter MacKay under the bus a little bit. That was kind of funny. He's going to get you in a headlock later. (laughter) No doubt. But you know, it's funny, it's great. VeeamON is an experience for people. You know, it's not just about the hardcore learning, which there's a lot of that going on, but it's about having fun. And a lot of people here are having fun, and you guys embrace that, it's great. >> Yeah, I mean, it's part of our culture, right? I think that's why it's a great company. It's one of the reasons why I came here. And listen, if you can't have fun doing something you love, there's something wrong. So, yeah, we're going to keep that up. >> A lot of sports analogies going on too, which we love in The Cube, oh geeze, ya know? (laughter) Sports angles, and so you guys seem like you're pretty competitive. You're not afraid to put it out there. So, give us the lay of the land. What's happening in the marketplace? >> So, on the cloud specifically this is an area of major growth for us at Veeam. I think it's certainly a competitive landscape, no question about that, but I think we have some advantages given our lineage and where we've evolved from, from an on-prem organization into the cloud. The cloud market's moving very rapidly. You heard me talk about that this morning a little bit, about the pace of cloud adoption. I think it's happening much more quickly than we've ever seen, and I haven't talked to anyone here, and having dozens and dozens of conversations, who haven't talked about having some kind of cloud strategy or trying to figure out how that impacts their go-forward planning in IT. >> You gave some IDC stats I wanted to ask you about that. 46% I think by 2019... >> 2019, right. >> Are going to be doing cloud, and I presume that meant both on-prem cloud? >> Correct. >> So, cloud being an operating model not necessarily a destination. >> That's right, yeah. >> Talk about that a little, what does that mean? >> So, yeah, you hear Danny and I talk about this all the time is that I've been doing the cloud since 2010 when I was with Azure at Microsoft. And everybody talks about moving to the cloud as if that's it, you know, once you're there, it's over with. The reality is, you need to think of the cloud as a way to deliver business results and deliver business solutions. So, just getting to the cloud doesn't mean you're over. Doesn't mean you don't have to think about things like availability and data protection and backup and disaster recovery. So the journey to the cloud, I think it's sort of a, it's a step, right? And then once you're there, there's a whole lot more that you have to do once you're there. >> Paul, one of the things I've been seeing for a couple of years is when it comes to cloud, follow the applications and follow the data. You said you worked on Azure. I mean, no doubt that Azure has lots of applications. Business productivity, I think marketers did a great job this morning laying that out. Virtualization was kind of a tool that applications sat on top. What's that maturation that you see of customers as to how they think about their data and their applications and where things live? >> Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think they're getting much smarter about how they separate and divide those things intelligently. Especially when you think about things like, you know, Mark talked this morning about Stretch DB moving into Azure. And so customers are having to rethink all that that because the cloud really does change how you have to think about application architecture, application deployment. Especially as you do division of data application and sort of the entire architecture end to end. So, I think we're still early days, quite frankly. I think for as much as cloud is in the buzz, and we love where we're evolving to as a cloud organization. The market in general is still early days, and there's a lot of work left to do there. >> Paul, what visibility do you give customers, and how do you help when it comes to the cost of all of this? There's so much, it's often on fud in the market place as to, oh well public cloud's super expensive. No wait, owning it yourself is always expensive. You should always rent versus buy. How do you inject yourself into that conversation? >> Great question, and this is something that has come up since day one. And the assumption is, you've got commodity hardware, you've got scale, so you've got decreasing costs. The reality is it's workload. It's entirely workload dependent, right? There are some workloads that you want to put into the cloud. Absolutely, you would experience amazing economics. We talked today about the scale out backup repository model, taking advantage of Blob story. Perfect example, one of the things customers need to think about is, in addition to those things is ingress and egress costs. It's not just the cost of storage. In the cloud, you have things that surround that in order to make it workable and make it really, really valuable. So one of the things we are doing now with customers is we're starting to work through and develop models to help them think though that. In various stages of network costs, storage costs, and being able to give them some tools that really help them make those decisions. It's not an easy task by any means because at the senior level, executives seem to say, well everybody's saving money in the cloud. Why aren't we there? Why aren't we experiencing that? When you get into the details, it's a little more complicated. But, at the end of the day, the right workload in the right cloud infrastructure, absolutely economic advantages, and more importantly, business advantages. >> Doesn't the savings or business impact really come from what we were talking about earlier, the operating model? Alan Nance, who was the former CIO of Phillips, he was on The Cube, and he said, "If you don't change your operating model, "you're going to just barely scratch the surface of benefits." And so, I wonder if we could explore that a little bit. Is that what you're seeing in the marketplace, that people lift and shift? Maybe there's an advantage that you're shifting CapEx to OpEx, but it's really not moving. >> No, I totally agree. That's not, and it's always frustrated me a little that the economic end of it really seems to dominate a lot of the conversation based on perception. The reality is, yes, this is about changing the operating model and changing the ability of the organization to map to customer demand and map to market demand. The cloud does provide that, and you can't just lift and shift. Yeah, that's okay for some things, but you really have to rethink, okay, if I have this agility and the ability to deliver solutions in a cloud, what does that really mean? How do I really have to think through that from end to end, not just, going back to our earlier question, I'm going to put that in the cloud and we're done. You know? Absolutely you have to rethink everything when you're moving to the cloud from an application's perspective. >> And then from Veeam's perspective, when you think about cloud, obviously you featured Azure up there today. You guys have talked about Affinity with AWS, but there's a lot of cloud providers. >> Paul: Oh yeah, 18,000 of 'em for us. >> And some of those may be managed hosting, but the business model is similar to cloud. So, what are you seeing in terms of the, the market's highly fragmented today. It's very localized. In your view, will it stay that way? Will you see substantial consolidation, or will it be more like the services markets typically are, which is very local, very fragmented, zillions of companies? >> I think, and we think, that there will continue to be a consolidation in this part of the market. There's been an explosion of providers. And what happens is, how do you differentiate if you're a provider in that market, right? What is your secret sauce? What makes you more attractive than another provider? And so, we were already seeing consolidation globally for organizations, so what'll happen, what we think will happen is, yes, there will be some that are very niche, very specialized that continue to have great success, but we will see organizations coming together. Increasingly what we're seeing is providers wrapping new value at its services around their offering, right? This is how they differentiate. We're also seeing service providers that are starting to verticalize. So specializing in a particular healthcare of financial services market as a way to provide value and differentiation for themselves. It's not going to just, and this is why one of the things we've done in Veeam is yes, we will continue to grow the provider base but really focusing ones that differentiate and add value to customers and can partner really, really well with Veeam. >> Paul, Veeam kind of grew up right at that time that not only was was VMware exploding on the market, but there was a new virtualization administrator that didn't exist before. And Veeam helped solve a really salient pain-point that they had. Can you talk to us about when it comes to cloud who are you selling to? The community's very different in a very fragmented cloud world than that kind of big VMware community that we all know. >> Yeah, so it's interesting because we're clearly in an evolution at Veeam. Veeam's legacy, very squarely focused in IT and the IT pro community. That won't change. That will not change. But as you heard from all of our messaging here over the past couple of days, what we really want to continue to evolve to is understanding from a business perspective what is the business value of driving agility, or, driving agility and availability? And so that is now a conversation at a different level. You're talking a CIO level. You're talking COO level. And that's an evolution. It's an easy conversation to have when you're talking about a bits and bytes perspective of how do the bits move, and what are these feature's functions? But you'll see us continually now relate this to, what are the business outcomes? What are the business risks? Why do you need to have an availability strategy, and why is Veeam the choice for that? >> So your positioning is as an availability specialist. No question about that. I want to start by talking a little bit about the market for that. So there's Multi-Cloud, there's Hybrid-Cloud that you've talked about this. I don't know, sometimes we call it inter-clouding. But you are positioning the strategy as positioning in the middle of all that as the availability, the best at availability, always on. So, first of all, how big is that market? Can you talk a little bit about the TAM, however you look at it? Maybe not hardcore numbers, but if you have 'em, we'd love it, but how do you look at that? >> Well I think Peter presented some data in his keynote on Tuesday. And we see the total addressable market as in the six to nine billion dollar range, which is pretty massive. If we can capture just a fraction of that, we're going to easily blow through our stated goals of getting to a billion, a billion five in the next couple of years. So, and that's why we're going to, we will continue to focus across the spectrum of those platforms, right? You heard us talk about, that's the core. We grew up in virtualization, now physical, and that we're going to attack storage. But, and we won't lose that. But now, understanding how all the different cloud assets and cloud platforms intersect that, that whole market is massive and will continue to grow. It's interesting, I was talkin' the other night with an analyst about cloud predictions, and we said, we'd love to go back and look at the last four or five years of predictions from analysts and see, where do they land? Where do they really end up? And I went back, and this is not an in-depth, robust survey, but going back a few years looking at all the estimates of cloud market growth, they were all wrong. And they were all wrong on the low side, all right? And it's hard sometimes to get analysts to not over-hype things, right? But everyone that I looked at, it was more, the reality turned out to be greater than what the prediction was. >> It's the definition of a disruptive technology 'cause we're usually horrible at forecasting it, right? >> (laughing) Yeah, exactly, exactly, which is a good thing. >> So in that sort of center of the cloud, if we can call it that, explain to people why Veeam and not a higher level of abstraction. Like VMware for example, them tryin' to be sort of, even though they're not availability specialists, but they're pretty good at availability. And people are concerned about managers of managers. Why does Veeam win in that scenario? >> I think Veeam wins in that scenario given the breadth of our capability, given the breadth of what we do, thing number one, given the breadth of our ecosystem, number two. We don't have all the answers, but we have an amazing partner ecosystem that does. And number three, I would say the simplicity, right? This mantra that we have at Veeam of it just works, that's very, very valuable. I heard, you know just wandering around here, unsolicited. People don't know who I am when I'm walking with my badge off. And I've heard multiple times, they're not kidding when they say that it just works thing. That's something that we will never ever get away from, and that's a clear differentiator for us. We were talking, we did a breakout session the other day, Danny and I, and we were with a number of service providers, and they asked, we had these canonical examples of what we're doing. And they asked a few questions of why can't we do this? And Danny and I would look back and say, well you can do that, but it's not to the point where we have it yet where we say, it just works. There's a way to string it together. There's a way Veeam can solve that problem, but we need to continue to improve engineering in order to get it to the point where it just works. To make it that simple, elegant, and that's a huge differentiation. >> So the premise there is it's not a zero sum game, certainly between you and VMware because of the simplicity and the integration that you do with VMware. Very interesting dynamic going on in the marketplace. It's early days, but you guys are, I love the positioning. It's clean and it's focused. >> No, thanks, I'm glad because we love the feedback. It's something we work really, really hard at. Veeam is in a great period of transition, bringing Peter on, the leadership team that Peter's brought in. That's really, really important that we're able to communicate where we're going and how we position because we are so passionate about it. You want to make sure that the words come out, well, and that the messaging is proper, and that our strategy is locked on. >> All right, we'll give you the last word on VeeamON 2017, bumper sticker as the trucks are pullin' away... What does it say? >> I mean, I think it's an amazing event. It's my first VeeamON. I have been blown away by the energy and the information that we've shared. I think we have a lot of exciting things that are coming down the pike, and we just can't be thankful enough for the great participation and look forward to the future. >> All right, Paul Mattes, thanks for comin' on The Cube. >> Hey, thanks guys. >> All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest at The Cube. We're live from VeeamON 2017 from New Orleans. We'll be right back. (upbeat jingle) (electronica jingle)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome, everybody. This is theCUBE's special coverage of Veemon 2017 from New Orleans. theCUBE is the leader in live tech coverage, and this is our second day wall-to-wall coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Danny Allan is here as the Vice President of Cloud and Alliance Strategy at Veeam. Danny, big week for you. >> Very exciting to be here. My first VeeamON, so you can imagine how excited I am. >> Us too. So cloud and Alliance Strategy, what is the strategy there? Sum it up for us. >> So kind of three things. There's to the cloud, from the cloud, within the cloud. So if you break those out, most organizations today, what they're doing, or what they do is they use their backups, they push them up to the cloud. Some of those that are in areas where they care about disaster recovery are using disaster recovery as a service, both of those kind of pushing services up to the cloud. From the cloud would be things like SAS services. You have things like Office 365, pull the data down, protect it because it belongs to you. And then within the cloud, we've seen our customers with cloud-hosted workloads, and they say, "I want to keep my protection but in a different cloud, "in a multi-cloud world." >> Interesting they would say, in the keynote this morning, they would say, "Well, today's going to be cloud day," but yesterday you had some AWS announcements, too. We know today you can't talk about IT without having cloud and kind of the hybrid multi-cloud get dispersed everywhere. Lot of announcements. What I was hoping you could dig into a little bit for us is the Veeam powered network with Azure and maybe give us the quick overview and let's drill down in there a little bit. >> Sure, so one of the capabilities we've had for a while is this ability to do direct restore to Azure. So you have the Veeam, it goes down and you hit a button and it goes up to Azure. Now that's all great, but when that server was in your data center, you could actually just connect to it because it was on your network. One of the challenges is when you put something up in the cloud, how do you get your users to that service? It's a different IP, it's a different subnet, it's a different network. So this is to make it simple. We've always focused on it just works, so this is a model that we can do a very simple model to connect users to the service when we push it up into the cloud. >> Yeah, maybe, I think most people in cloud understand the Amazon VPN service. Could you maybe compare and contrast that with what you've got? >> Very similar. So Amazon does the VPC, and this just takes it down and simplifies it so that it's part of your orchestration strategy. So typically, when you have something running up in the cloud, what happens is you set it up, the connection, and you maintain the connection for the duration of that service. This is a little bit different, because you want the connection, but only when you need it. And so it's orchestrating that connection in a very simple lightweight way that you don't have to maintain an ongoing connection. That enables that service delivery. >> There's a lot of talks at events like this and certainly has been at this event about just migrating workloads and help us square the circle. So you hear a lot of that talk, and then the same time you hear about data explosion, data growth, and then there's the speed of light problem. So how are customers sort of managing that, and how can you help? >> So I don't necessarily believe that organizations are migrating from cloud to cloud on a regular basis. But what does happen is they outgrow the cloud that they happen to be in. We see this in private cloud all the time. I have so much capacity, I don't have any left, I need to jump over to another cloud. So there's kind of three drivers that cause people to go into a multi-cloud air. One is certainly disaster recovery. Second though is cost optimization and business alignment. So it's sometimes you'll have an executive level far above IT says, "Hey, we strategically aligned "with this cloud; we would like to shift workloads "over to another one." And the last is around really the footprint of the cloud provider themselves. So it could be because of geophysical location or compliance certifications. That organizations say, "I need to take this particular "service and move it over here." >> We had some talk about cloud service providers as a channel this week, and what's the discussion like with CSPs in terms of them monetizing services? And how do you help? With whether it's software defines something, or programatic thresholds through APIs. Can you and how do you support that monetization strategy? >> So, a few different things. One is that the cloud service providers are very focused on their specific value add. And if you go talk to them, some of them are heavy in security, some of them are heavy in the managed services, some of them are heavy in the analytics. They all have a specific value add that they have. But one of the things that we do for them is in the platforms that we've announced, like Veeam Availability Console has a full restful API that they can integrate into their environment. Take iland, for example. They have their own portal, they call their APIs, customer never sees anything other than their specific portal, and that's true for all of the products that we've been announcing. Veeam Availability Console, Veeam Backup for Office 365, we enable that integration with our product set. >> One of the other announcements that we were digging into a little bit is to be able to have an archive tier with a lot of the object storage out there. Whether it be as the Amazon Blob, is this some of the AWS offerings, or any kind of S3 or Swift compatible solutions. Is that something that you've been hearing customers asking for for a while? How do you expect that to roll out? >> It is. So there's two kinds of customers. Those that say, "Hey, I would like to leverage "the hyper-scale public clouds 4S3 or Azure. "We have credits with them, we want to use them up." And so this enables them to push off an archive tier to the data up to there. But we also see organizations, especially the large ones that are building their own on premises object storage because of the characteristics of scale up, scale out. And they've been saying, "Hey, we want to leverage that." Now, the performance historically has not been as good as block storage, obviously, but now it's catching up and people are using it more for an archive tier than a primary tier or a secondary tier. >> The other day at the analyst briefing, you talked about there were three things that came out. One was digital transformation and agility, and we want to explore that a little bit. The other was core business continuity, and the third was analytics and visualization. And I wonder if we could stick on that for a minute. That analytics and visualization. Can you explain a little bit further what you guys bring to the table there and how customers are using it? >> So one of the things that Veeam has is an archive of all of your data that is stored. And we've been looking to expose that data to our partners so that they can dig into it and add their value. So we announced a partnership with Data Gravity, for example, that reaches into those VMs. And as regulations like GDPR come out, then there is a higher and higher business need, sorry, General Data Protectionary Regulation, higher and higher business need to understand what is in the data that we're storing and then perform analysis on it. >> Yeah, so GDPR takes affect like basically a year from now, right? >> Danny: Yeah, May. >> May of '18. We've had also a lot of discussion about ransomware, and just creating air gaps and so forth. The reason why I was so interested in analytics and visualization is it seems that it would require more than just an air gap because Bill Philbin said it today. When you make a boo boo, the boo boo gets replicated very quickly. Well, when someone's maliciously encrypting your data, it probably gets maliciously encrypted very quickly, or replicated very quickly. It seems that you are in a unique position to provide analytics on an anomalous behavior on change data. Has that discussion taken place with your partners and clients? >> Yes, absolutely, we're looking at it. In fact, there was a breakout session on this very thing. Basically, when you saw the files being deleted from a particular folder or .docex files being changed to .enc files, when you saw a ransomware attack taking place that you could actually roll back to the latest snapshot, or you could take a snapshot and send an email to someone and say, "Hey, this is happening, you should look at it." I look forward actually out into the future that we can leverage some of the things that we're doing now with continuous data protection that traps the IO traffic. So that is the VCR API for IO filtering. And if you see an attack taking place, you could actually roll back that IO journal say five minutes and say take a snapshot at that point even before it happened. So it has more behavioral-based protections associated with it. So I think we're at a really interesting era in the space where we're going to begin to see new things that have never been done in the past. >> And potentially specific solutions are around ransomware. Maybe they'll talk about it generically, maybe they're out there, I just haven't seen a very specific, I'm sure they are out there. But I haven't seen a specific solution around. It seems like the guy with the backup data would be in a unique position to do that. >> Yeah, data is the lifeblood of the organization, so being able to mine it for data insights, being able to leverage that for data governance, being able to use it for e-discovery, but also to be able to use it in proactive ways for the business. Like determining that a ransomware attack is taking place and perhaps fire off instructions to your perimeter to act differently. Who knows what these things are going to go towards. But the data is the content that actually drives a lot of those behaviors. >> Danny, one of the things I found interesting, Mark Rosinovich's keynote. He was talking about the evolution of application platforms and Veeam started with the VM, and I saw a lot of the show. There's physical endpoints, there's cloud endpoints. When you start going to things like paths an even serverless functions as a service, what impact will that have on availability overall and where does Veeam see that going in your world? >> So our vision is to perform always on availability for any service, so as we go forward into containers and serverless, there's still a requirement to provide protection. So I was listening to him as he was saying, "Hey, there could be an API that resizes the image." You could actually use that exact same API to say, "Hey, is that image important? "Send it over to this repository for retention." So there's still a requirement for availability, and what it means is, if you're looking at paths and container-type model, then maybe we do it underneath the containers to protect them as they're running. But if you're looking at serverless, maybe we actually inject it into the APIs itself to perform that same protection. It's going to be required no matter what the structure of the data happens to be. >> We're out of time, but maybe, Danny, quick summary of the announcements that you guys made this week and some of the things that people are excited about. >> Yeah, so a lot of different announcements, obviously. Veeam Availability Console Release Candidate is out. We announced a whole lot of disaster recovery as a service functions for service providers. Things like continuous data protection, things like VCD integration. We announced Veeam Backup for Office 365. Actually two different versions of it. One is for service providers, multi-tenant, multi-repository, but also adding in SharePoint and OneDrive capabilities. We obviously, our flagship product, Veeam Availability Suite. We talked a lot about the object storage. We talked about continuous data protection. A lot of these capabilities have been announced over the last few days. >> Yeah, so Veeam, you've seen a lot of strategy, they're hitting R and D, turning it into product, turning into customer value and revenue. So you guys have been busy and quite an impressive stream of innovation coming out this week. So Danny, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing that with us. >> Thank you very much. Appreciate being here. >> Okay, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman live from VeeamON 2017. Right back.

(bright music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans. It's The Cube! Covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back. Eric Bassier is here. He's the senior director of data center products at Quantum, Veeam partner. Big announcement this week. Eric, good to see you again. Thanks for coming back on. >> Thank you guys for having me. >> So, big theme of this event is, of course, the ecosystem. Veeam sells exclusively through channel partners. Very partner-friendly. Obviously, you guys are the leader in the backup in data protection space. Give us the lowdown on what you guys have announced this week, and we'll get into the partnership. >> Yeah, absolutely. Really excited about what we've announced this week. We've announced new integration with Veeam, both with our DXi deduplication appliances, as well as with our scalar tape products, and we can kind of talk about both individually. On the DXi side, we've integrated with Veeam's data mover service. And what that means is that some of the advanced features that Veeam has, like instant VM recovery, synthetic full backup creation. Historically, we haven't been able to support that on the DXi. And with this latest integration, we've improved performance quite a bit to where we can support those advanced features. And, you know, happy to talk more about that. We think this is a, it's a big step for us. It's a bit of a gap we've had with our DXi a little bit with Veeam. And I think it's going to bring a lot more value to Veeam customers using that deed of appliance. >> Eric, you know, there's always in the keynote, tape gets mentioned, and there's some people that are excited, and some people that look at it sideways and say, "Wait, we still use tape?" I saw tweets going out there, tape and VTL both alive and well, doing there. But, what are you seeing? Maybe help clear up any misconceptions. >> You know, I had a conversation today at VeeamON with a joint Quantum and Veeam customer, and it was an interaction that perfectly summed it up. And they said they were planning to move away from tape and get rid of it. And the events of this last weekend changed their mind. Verbatim. >> Ransomware. >> Ransomware. And Veeam has been good, actually, about promoting why they love tape and why it's important to their customers, and they talk not so much about low cost, long term retention, right? I think there's a really good place for tape as long-term storage for massive scale unstructured data. That's more on kind of the other side of our business. But in the data protection realm, it's about that offline or air-gapped copy to protect against ransomware. And we're seeing, I would almost say, a resurgence in relevance, just from that perspective. It's changing how people use tape, but from that perspective, I think it's as relevant as ever. >> Are your customers actually thinking that way and actually deploying tape in that context? And how does that all work? I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, I think they are. I think many of them have been doing it for a number of years. We, at this show, and for a while with Veeam, we've been promoting the old rule or adage, 3-2-1 data protection best practices. I think a lot of our customers that use tape follow that practice. And... You know, they... They're probably not... We've certainly seen customers use less tape for backup. No doubt about it. They're consolidating it in the data centers, but they still create that offline copy. And then they keep it either offsite, or even just on premise, and it's got that air gap. It's not on the network, so it's not susceptible to these ransomware viruses. >> So I want to unpack that a little bit. I had a conversation with Edward, our buddy Edward Helekiel, give him credit for this idea. And I was sort of making that argument that it has that air gap, and his point was, "Well, yeah, but you got to recycle the backups, "the offline tape." And I said, "Okay." His point was, if you... 'Cause my understanding is with ransomware, everything starts to get encrypted. And then you got to pay for the keys. So if you're backing up encrypted data, eventually you're in trouble, unless you have a way to detect it. So, is that part of the... Again, we're sort of veering off into a tangent of ransomware. >> No, that's all right. >> But you would think that a backup supplier like Veeam would be able to detect anomalies because you're doing incremental change data every day or multiple times per day, and if you're starting to see some uptick in anomalous activity, say, "Whoa, hold on!" Maybe that's a signal. Is that the right way to think about it? >> You know, I do think, I think that Veeam, and I think that some of the other data protection applications are starting to build a little bit of intelligence and to try to detect it. I don't know... I'm not an expert on that. I can't speak to it. I would say that, we would advocate as a best practice that customers should be making that offline copy on tape with adequate frequency so that the feel like they're protected. Because I wouldn't say that you need to rotate the tapes, but I would think about it as if you create tapes once a day, and then you get hit with a ransomware attack, the data that's going to be susceptible is any new data that's been created since the last backup you made on tape a day ago. It's kind of that old backup rule a little bit. >> Dave: So your RPO is one day? >> That's right, and so... But once you've got that offline copy created on tape, it can be on premise, or it can be offsite at a vault or something, and keep it there for as long as you need to keep it there. It's offline, it's not on the network. >> And the backup software vendor is in a good position to provide visibility to those anomalies. Okay, let's go back to the appliance that you had asked. >> Before I do, actually, just so we're on the segue, it actually goes, let's stick with tape for a second. >> Dave: Yeah, be happy to. >> And... We can come back to dedup side. The cool thing we've done is, for Veeam customers, historically, it's been difficult to create tape in a Veeam environment because they've required an external physical tape server. And, of course, their customers are largely virtualized, right? Well, we've solved that. So what we've done is we've, we just announced what we call our Scalar iBlade for our new scalar tape libraries. It's an embedded intel-based blade server that fits in the back of our library chassis. And it comes with a Windows operating system on that. And... What it does, we've designed it so it can actually host a Veeam tape server, a Veeam proxy server. Really easy to install, and I can talk more about that. Net for customers is, they can now create tape in a Veeam environment without this external dedicated physical server. >> Dave: You just utilize the resource on your appliance. >> So on the one hand, it's not anything super revolutionary. On the other hand, there's nobody else in the market that has anything like this for tape. I joke that it's converge tape, or it's hyper converge tape, because we built the compute in. But... It's more of a marketing thing. I think for customers, it is providing a really good value. Because they're able to create tapes in a Veeam environment now, really easy way, and if they're in a 100% virtualized environment, they can do that without having to install that separate physical server. So that's iBlade. That was one of the big things we announced, and certainly sort of a cornerstone of what we talk about for 3-2-1 data protection. >> So Eric, of course, one of the big announcements this morning was the version 10 of the Veeam Availability Suite. What does that mean to your customers and kind of joint development? >> There's a few things. There's one minor thing that I'll put a plug in, in that, in Veeam version 10, we'll actually have the, our DXi appliance be added to the Veeam user interface. So kind of a user usability enhancement. >> Simplifies things. >> Yeah, it simplifies things. I'm excited about the direction Veeam is taking in terms of... In fact, I just saw Jason talk about it a little bit. It's kind of this progression from backup to availability, and now to almost data management and getting more value out of that secondary storage. And when I think about Quantum, our focus is about secondary storage. It's about data protection and archive storage. And we've got some unique solutions there. I think we can have a hardware or storage portfolio that complements Veeam really well. It will be able to kind of bring that much more to the table for their customers. I'm excited about the direction that they talked about. I'm interested in learning more about it, but I'm excited about it. >> So, let's go back to the dedup appliance. You were saying that you've made really some enhancements to be able to exploit some of the things that the features at Veeam has been introducing over the years. Can you explain that a little bit further? >> Yeah, we... We... So the DXi's an inline variable dedup appliance. So the benefits of that, really good data reduction, et cetera, et cetera. One of the sort of gaps that we had was we just needed to make communication more efficient between a Veeam proxy server and our dedup appliance. And we've been working with the Veeam engineering team on this for about a year or something. We decided to go the route where we were going to use their data mover service. And so we've now announced that integration. The way it works from a customer perspective, pretty simple. Configure the DXi as a target. Once that backup job kicks off, Veeam actually installs a little data mover agent right on the DXi. And then we can use their data mover protocol to be able to communicate between the proxy and the dedup target. Net for a customer, it just makes operations, like instant VM recovery or creating a synthetic full backup 10 times faster or 20 times faster than where we were previously. >> Which was using a different data mover. >> Yeah, it was just a using a CIFS, NFS, or just standard kind of-- >> So not really a high-speed data mover designed to, okay. >> And we've done some things in our software through our, just our learnings, and the work that we've collaborated on with the Veeam engineering team. We've done some things in our DXi software to try to optimize reads and kind of how we do that under the covers, just to speed up things like instant VM recovery. So we've done some things there that I think will have a good benefit in terms of improved performance. >> I'm hearing a lot of just really practical activities going on in the partnership ecosystem, which says, "Okay, we got this big TAM. "How do we actually penetrate it? "How do we increase our ability to capture that TAM?" A perfect example here. >> Eric: Yeah, that's right. >> So where do you guys go from here? >> You know, I think we've been partnered with Veeam for a number of years now. We've got a lot of joint customers. I think this integration is just kind of, kind of the next step in our partnership, and... I think that given Veeam's direction, I just think we have even more opportunity to integrate with them, and I think it's going to be in the areas of not just data protection, but archive and kind of managing data over its life. You know, and I mean, that's... We already talk about that in terms of some of the things we do for our customers in different industries, like broadcast or post-production. I'm excited to kind of bring that into the data protection realm and the data center. And I think we'll be able to do some really cool things with it. >> Last question I have for you is sort of customer interactions. What are you hearing from them these days? Beyond the digital transformation bromide. What are some of the hardcore gnarly things that they want you to solve? >> You know, when I'm out talking to customers, I think it's... It seems to be all about Flash. It's all about the Cloud, and it's kind of all about convergence or hyper convergence. I think our customers, especially in IT, they're wrestling with this completely new infrastructure design. And what's the right roadmap for them to kind of go from here to there? And that's where, you know, that's where we're investing. That type of a transition doesn't happen overnight. And so, I think we just want to be there to help our customers kind of along that roadmap and along that journey. Embrace the Cloud and embrace these new technologies. Help 'em get to where they need to go. (chuckles) >> Excellent, well, Eric, thanks for sharing your announcements, and congratulations on all the hard work you're getting to market. We know how much goes into that, so we really appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thank you guys very much. Thank you. >> You're welcome, all right, so that's a wrap for us today. We'll be back tomorrow. We start at, what time do we start tomorrow, Stu? >> Stu: Right after the keynote. >> Right after the keynote. >> Stu: So, 11 o'clock. >> 11 a.m. local time. We're in New Orleans. >> Stu: Central. (chuckles) >> So that's central. And check out siliconangle.tv for all the videos today. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. And we'll see you tomorrow, everybody. Thanks for watching. (energetic music) (typing) (plane engine accelerating)

(mellow music) >> Announcer: Live, from New Orleans, it's theCUBE, covering Veeam ON, 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back at the big easy, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage Dave Valente with Stu Miniman, Jason Buffington, long time CUBE guest and lead analyst at ESG, Jason, great to see you again. >> Thanks for having me >> @JBuff you're welcome, it's always a pleasure. You are an icon in this business. Ratmeyer today on theCUBE brought you up, said my friend, Jason Buffington, made an observation about the industry, and it's great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> So, you got some good play in the keynotes this morning, you guys just recently did a study that you spearheaded, talking about the availability gap, tell us about that research. >> So, 24 countries, a little under 1100 enterprises. So all organizations, over 1000 employees, and what we wanted to look at was how often are you down, how much does it cost when you're down, what are the differences between what the business expects of you, versus what you can actually deliver. Right, and by the way, that's the definition of the gap. Right, so the business expects that we cannot tolerate more than 30 minutes of downtime, and yet your fail over window is two hours. You have the availability gap. If the business says I cannot tolerate more than an hour of data loss, but you only backup once per night, you have a protection gap, right. So, looking at those gaps between the business expectations, and what IT can deliver, via whatever tools they're using, it was an unbiased panel, is what we went off and quantified. There were some really interesting numbers in there. >> Were you able to go to the same firm and ask of business people and IT people at the same firm? >> No, in this case what we did is we looked for IT decision makers who were familiar with the data protection processes they were using, and as well as being able to speak to business issues. So kind of look for the director IT, VP IT, someone who already has the business grade conversation. Probably the person who is being held accountable by the business units when IT fails to deliver. >> Do you think that, we've had a bunch of conversations with the practitioners today about what's the business conversation like, "well we go to the business" "and say how much data are you willing to lose." "Well none!" and then they go back and say >> There's a price for that >> There's a price for that, right. And most are not doing charge backs, some are doing show backs, so it's up to IT to say okay, look, we know they can't afford it. We can't afford it, so this is the level of service that we're going to give them. Do you think that's where the availability gap exists? Or is it because people have the wrong architecture, the wrong processes? >> I think it's more the former than the latter. I did a breakout session on this report earlier today. There was a great question in Q & A, why is it backup is still broken? Why is it no one can fix these gaps? And, what I offered them was that there's a lot of folks that just underestimate backup. They think of it as a cost center. They think it's always broken. Well, backup is not broken, the problem is if we were all still using Windows server 2003 physical boxes and exchange and sequel were still on pram and file was just that, we'd have solved backup ten years ago, right. But every time that you modernize production, it forces a modernization of protection. If you do it reactively, it's because you put in this brand new shiny flex pod or v-block or whatever, and figured out oh that legacy backup doesn't work. If you do it proactively, then you're catching up with things. But the problem is if you underestimate the importance of that, you get these gaps, right? So, what I counseled to the room that I was in was the first thing you have to do is you have to stop talking about data protection, even availability as an IT problem. It is a business impact cause, period. Right, so the first thing you want to do is you want to get all the tech out of the conversation. So, I offer a formula up, I published a book back in 2010, and there's a free chapter. I'll get it to you, so you can put in online, but I basically breakdown the cost of downtime into four values. There's the cost of lost data, there's the cost of lost productivity, right. So there's time down and time you have to repeat. And you can equate those to R2 and RPO. But a parentheses around those and times what's the human cost plus the profitability cost. And that's overly simple, but the point is if you know how long you're down, if you know how much data you will have lost, multiply that times how many butts and seats are sitting idle and how much did the inside sales department not sell that hour, right. That tells you cost of outage. And then all you have to do at that point, and there's no tack in that, right. It's just what is your RPO in real, what's your RTO in real, how much do your humans cost, how much does your department lose? If you have those four things, you know how much the problem is. Then, all you have to do is just go back to your system log and say how many times did that happen this year. If you do that, you've turned an IT problem into a business problem. Anytime I get a hold of C-level executives, the first thing I talk to them about availability is downtime is not in your budget, right. The idea of doing nothing costs you money. That's not in your budget and I guarantee of you did a data protection and availability solution, that will cost you less to your bottom line than the downtime that's unplanned that you have not budgeted for. >> Jason, Ratmere in the keynote this morning talked about the last ten years and they launched a new logo, talked a lot about cloud and physical and the next 10 years. What's your take on the message? Veeam just changed the leadership up a little bit. Are they in a transitional phase? Where are they positioned for kind of that next wave? >> So, the whole market's kind of in a transitional phase. So, I've been in data protection for 28 years. The only thing I've done since before getting out of school. Every time that we've had a major IT platform shift, the leaders in data protection have not made that jump, right. I started when we were doing mid-range, going to netware and over to Windows. >> That was what Ratmeyer was saying today. I didn't want to steal your thunder, so I'm glad you've brought this up. He noted that you had observed this, so carry on. >> Yeah so in times passed, we went went from physical to virtual servers, those leaders didn't make the jump and Veeam did, right. Veeam kind of took the crown on that for this whole last run. Our platform is shifting again, right. Now the difference this time around is and by the way the reason that most people don't make the jump is because whatever made you great from a technology perspective the last time around, doesn't apply to the new platform, right. So, NLMs didn't apply to Windows, agents didn't apply to hosts. We're now moving into cloud, but it's not a cloud, right. Some folks want IS, some want SAS. Neither of those use the same approaches that Veeam's secret sauce for host-based protection will carry for. So, the industry is in kind of a flux, and the other thing which is different this time around is when I was helping people move on to Windows NT, the presumption was we we're going to shutdown all the netware when we were done, right. For most of us, as we move into virtual machines, the presumption was we'd get rid of the metal on the way out. In this case though, cloud is not necessarily the end state, the end state is hybrid. Some data will be on pram, most of that data will be virtualized, some of it will still be physical. Right, the data that's in the cloud. Some of it will just be cloud stores, some of it will be the IS hosted VM, some of it will be SAS. But that's not because it's a prolonged transition, it's because we shouldn't be talking about migration, we should be talking about agility, where some data starts in the cloud and comes home. Other data starts on pram and moves, or from cloud to cloud. Because of that multi-cloud hybrid architecture, if that's the new end state for what IT is going to be delivering on, then the rules change. There is no secret sauce that carries from the last generation over. Certainly, Veeam's going to continue to be thought of as the virtualization data protection solution. But, if you think about they've added agents for physical, they've added cloud-based support on the back end. They announced more support for Office 365 and SAS. They're not a virtualization only play anymore. So, the market is going to have to take a reset, where everybody is unified, the difference is you've got the legacy folks that are unified and trying to catch up on virtualization features. And you've got Veeam, who is unified, where their virtualization is their strong suit, and cloud hosted and physical are the catch ups. So they're flying in opposite directions. >> So, you're saying that Veeam's secret sauce doesn't and virtualization doesn't necessarily carry over, however, they're making moves that will allow them to bridge, is that right? >> Absolutely, so unlike everyone else, who is in that virtualization wave, who solved the end protection and then happily got sold for their IP and you don't know those brands anymore. In this case, Veeam has continually looked at what else do people need, let's go do that. So, 4 or 5 years ago they added snapshot support, which wasn't necessary, but added more scenarios. Then, they added tape, who adds tape in 2015? Right, but they did because they recognized that people needed tape out, and since then they've added cloud, a couple different versions of cloud. This week they announced continuous data protection. Now, I'm glad no one from SNIA is around, cause they have a very prescriptive definition of what CDP is supposed to look like, and this isn't exactly that, so it's really more like KCDP, Kind of CDP, kind of thing. But, they continue to arrow the edges. They added physical support, those agents walls will allow them for IS hosted. They're not unified anymore, and that forward motion, but the moment they've got coming off of the first strategy, that's what's going to keep them moving forward for the next ten years. >> What makes is not KCDP, and makes it pure CDP? Just an infinite granularity or? >> Well, if you ask SNIA folks, they would tell you it's not just about infinite granularity on the protection, it's also infinite recoverability on the way back. So every single microsecond, so-- >> Stu: That's CRR isn't it? >> Yeah, think more like sequel does with every given transaction, could we go back to a given point. >> You need a data base to be involved, to actually get there. >> Yeah, but again, what I think is interesting is it's not just about backup, so in the availability report we talked about the gap between how little downtime that an organization can tolerate, versus just backup can't meet that goal. You can't recover fast enough if the only thing you're going to do is restore from backup. So, being able to integrate snapshots, being able to have replication, which shrinks down that data loss window considerably, that's how you meet the rest of the story, that backup alone can't do. And kudos to Veeam for doing it. >> Jason, how should we think about some of these emerging players who are actually in Veeam's ecosystem? Like Rubric or Cohesity, or Datos. Datos is not here, These sort of new, emerging, they don't want to call themselves backup players, they want to call themselves data protection or availability. How should we think about those emerging players? >> So, I have a category in a slide. I put them all in the category that I lovingly call the disrupters, right, because it forces you to reconsider the conversation. If you kind of step back and I could put Veeam and some of the other legacy unified enterprise class data protection products in one category, and what all of them are saying is let's take the backups that you know and trust us with. We're going to add indexing, we're going to add orchestration, we're going to help you do more with your data along the way. The end result is what the industry is calling copy data management. What else can you do with that data, which is otherwise dormant, sitting away in a store. What the disrupter category would tell you, is instead of starting with backup, and trying to evolve it forward, start with new storage. Think of the things you could do with a new paradigm for storage. >> So, the storage that would automatically know where the footprints are, that would automatically back you up along the way, that would automatically allow for copy data management type scenarios. So, again, it's two ways to get there. There's the backup first approach, and building on who you trust, then, there's the, if you want to start over again, have I got a deal for you. And that's going to be really interesting. For the rest of 2017 and 2018, the whole space of copy data management, copy data virtualization, copy data fill in the blank, that whole idea of good, better, best. Good, keep all your data as long as you need. Better, and get rid of it a moment longer. Then best, what else can you do with it. Analytics, testing, reporting, et cetera. That'll be an interesting market to watch, and one that now that Veeam is broad enough, will start to play in now as the year moves forward. >> Jason, like us, you go to a lot of these conferences. You've been to the Veeam on trail, which was our first one here. For the audience it's not here. What differentiates this show from some of the other ones you go to. What excites you about the community, the show itself, anything surrounding it? >> Sure, Veeam has a wonderful sense of community that most of the other vendors have just not been able to capitalize on. You know, there's certainly, there are many many thousands of IT professionals that have made their career out of this storage platform, or that backup software platform, et cetera. And, they're all good for support. Veeam has somehow cracked that code like Microsoft MVPs. The difference between a post-sale's we'll help you if you want, to a pre-sale's advocates. They literally have a green army walking around on this floor, who is delighted to tell anybody who will listen how Veeam saved their bacon, gave them back their weekend, et cetera. That energy of community, that's what's different about not only Veeam ON, it's also what's different about like a Veeam party at Vmworld or a Microsoft event. That culture and community, they've tapped something special there, and it shows in their results. >> Alright, we've got to wrap there, but I'll give you the last word, any upcoming research we should be paying attention to, or you want to promote a little bit? >> Sure, my blog within ESG is technicaloptimist.com. I do primary research on a whole bunch of things. Next ones coming out are on data protection modernization. So, why are people staying put or changing. If so, why or why not, and then what features matter most. So that's the next one that'll come out for me, and then over the summer I'm going to look at appliances as form factor, there's a lot of those to look at this week. What the affect of the DVA and the VM are having in the market, and then also more on the availability study. What we did for Veeam was so interesting ESG is going to go and take a few other angles and look at it some more. >> Awesome, great research agenda you've got upcoming. We will be looking for that, so, Jason, thanks very much, it was a pleasure to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, alright, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back, with our next guest at theCUBE. We're live from Veeam ON, 2017 in New Orleans, We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans. It's The Cube, covering VeeamON, 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. It's our first day of coverage at VeeamON 2017. The first time The Cube has covered VeeamON and it's quite an event. About 3,000 people here and as I say, we're being going two days of coverage talking to executives and partners and of course, the customers, we love the customer segments. Markus Marksteiner is here. He's the CTO of Baloise Group, insurance company out of Switzerland. Markus, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for coming on. >> You're welcome. >> So tell us a little bit about your company, your role and what are some of the things driving IT decisions. >> Okay, so are a life insurance and long life insurance company within Switzerland. We also have a bank in Switzerland which is included. We operate in Europe, in the country of Belgium and Germany and Luxembourg and Lichtenstein. So we are a company with about seven and a half thousand employees. And my role in there, is actually I'm a head of infrastructure and supports so I'm responsible for the data center, the user service center and the workplace environment. I also act as a group CTO because we have centralized all the data centers from the different locations to expose it to our headquarter. >> So financial services tends to be in the cutting edge of technology typically, very competitive industry and fast moving, very IT-oriented. What are some of the drivers in your business today? >> I think in the, especially in the insurance companies, we are, within Switzerland but also in Germany and Europe itself, it's a highly regulated market so. The possibility to, let's go for the public cloud is very limited because of regulation part. So therefore we have to deal with insurance companies within Europe but also within US and China, especially, which are very agile out on the market so. Therefore our business is now changing completely because from the traditional insurance which we have selled years ago, we will have to translate this into the industrialization world so meaning, we have to be more flexible on the market, to have shorter periods of production. And for me, as an IT reseller within the company, means my organization have to be agile as well. So, this is actually the most part we are changing to deal with security, that's the one part. But the other part is the agility. >> Paint a picture of your environment. What's it look like? Applications that you're supporting. What does your infrastructure look like. Your storage. Obviously, your backup, we'll talk about that. >> So we have, within Basel we have two data centers nearby. And we have now set up a third data center outside of Basel for disaster recovery because Basel is located on a earthquake area with a high risk impact so therefore our internal audit is set, it's not that good to have for the complete group data centers located on a earthquake plate so please set up a data center which is at least 100 kilometers away from our location now, so. Within the data centers, typically we have mainframes, we have servers, we have storage, all kinds of flavors. We have some centralization there. We have one with strategy in the infrastructure which a huge partnership with HP. In this area we have from storage part, we're using NetApp and DocuStorage. And as a backup software of course now, since nearly a year now, we are using Veeam for doing the backup of all the virtual machines. In the future, also the physical machines. And also we elevated Veeam because of the data implication into data center three. So this guarantees me to bring up the data at a certain time to get us into three to make the restore and the restart there. >> So you've got, two data centers within a synchronous distance and one is an asynchronous distance. Is that correct? So you have a three data center set up which is essentially is as close to zero data loss as you can get. >> Yeah, exactly. The data center three we are using not only as a cold backup standby data center, we are putting all the non-productive environment to this data center so we have all three data centers up and running and they have on a certain perspective productive level meaning for the developer, of course data center three is absolutely highly critical because they develop in data center three, all the data is there. For the productive part, we have data center one and two which is in Basel which has the availability there, so. We're using both sides and they're all connected together. >> How often do you test recovery in that set up? >> We're trying now to test it twice a year. But we cannot switch the complete data center because we have productive and-- >> Dave: It's too risky. >> It's too risky so we built up a reference model, a reference service where we have included all the environments we need to make it for the auditors visible that our infrastructure in data center three is working in case of an emergency. >> Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about the data protection strategy. So we have a high-level, we understand the data center approach but what about protecting the apps? How do you use Veeam? How did you start with Veeam and where are you now? >> I mean we came from an absolutely traditional data standards so we had a legacy backup system running based on file locks and then we started a certain time with NetApp and using snapshot technologies there. Because we had huge databases which are not able to fulfill the SLA anymore in the recovery mode so we have to switch them to them to NetApp. And then we started with data center three and then we had another problem. How can we replicate these data into data center three in a certain time to get the SLA fulfilled in case of an emergency. And there we made a revelation and Veeam was actually the one who was fulfilling all the requirements and it was easy to deal with them. So we decided, okay, let's try it Veeam. And at a certain time, we thought well, it's not only about data application with Veeam it's also about the complete backup stack, we can replace by this software. So we grow slowly with the possibilities we saw during the implementation phase. We said, okay, we can use this model and this model and then VeeamON came on so we could use the report part also for the sizing of the virtual machines and now on we just backing up almost everything with Veeam, so. >> Can you speak to organizationally, you know, how many people you have managing kind of backup and DR and what that experience has been like? >> In the past we had about three people which were responsible for the complete backup process. But they're very focused on their tooling, they could not tell me if the backup was correct. If the data was backuped correctly. They only say, yeah, my system is running and it's backuping but is it really also consistent. I don't know so we had to ask the engineers. With Veeam now, we switched completely. We do not have any responsible anymore for backup purposes itself. We took this because of the ease of use, the tool, we gave them directly to the engineers of Linux, of Citrix, or of Windows and they are now responsible for their own data. So they can now do the backups itself and they can also assure to me that this, what they do with the backup is correct and it's restartable. Because they have to check each time. >> Yeah, so you're not only operationally more efficient but you actually know that what you have works. >> Markus: Exactly. (laughing) Yeah, yeah. >> Great. I believe it's your first time at the conference. What's the experience been so far? What value have you been getting? What brought you here? >> Actually I came here with the goal to learn more about the Veeam company itself and this was actually during the networking areas and the networking part was very helpful for me to meet directly the management of Veeam to see what is their strategy and it was also in the general session, they have a story to tell and that's what, I was coming in here to get this information and in the sessions, and today also with the talks with Baronov directly and McKay, that's really, there's a spirit in this company. That's what we are looking for. Because we have so many big companies, vendors in our thing, where you do not have the connection to the management directly and for me it's very important because we try really to grow with our business and therefore I need a partner behind where I can rely on them. With Veeam, absolutely the case. >> So you mentioned supporting physical endpoints is something that interest you. Anything else from the announcements that you heard that excites you? Anything not there, that you're looking for in the future, too? >> Yeah, for the future for me it's actually the cloud connection is very important. Because we are still in the high-regulated market but I think also the insurance and the financial sector in Switzerland, there are slightly opening for the cloud services and also for us, it's the Office365 and Amazon web services, they're coming slightly into our organization and to know that there is also a possibility with the same backup software using this in a cloud, this gives me the feeling and also the assurance that I can go to my management and tell them, hey guys, we're choosing the right vendor because we can also use them for the cloud. I do not have to evaluate another product there for fulfilling this requirement. That's good to hear. >> So you sell insurance, your company does. Backup is largely insurance. How do you make the business case, what business benefits have you seen? Can you share with any metrics, maybe they're largely cost cutting. Maybe it's enabling DR. What can you share with us? >> The one thing I can share with you is actually we had a, that's not only based on Veeam by the product, by the backup itself, but it's also based on the Veeam reporter. We had in a branch office in Belgium. We have an issue where we had several active directory controllers running there. And with VeeamON, they reported that there's two controllers broken during the weekend and there's only one active directory controller available. Meaning, if this will also fail, we have to replicate the complete staff to Basel meaning 1500 users have to wait. And they are very aware about these profiles because they are using Citrix in the background. So meaning, we will probably have an issue there for about four to five almost a whole working day where a complete branch could not work. Meaning, there we just rolled up these two active controls with Veeam in a certain time period and then nothing happened. And I mean, counted in money, this would cost us at least a half a million Euro, this outage, if it occurred. >> Markus, in the key note, you know, one of the terms that gets thrown out is digital transformation. We've talked to a lot of financial service companies that, that terms resonate. What does it mean to your organization? How has it impacted your job? >> Yeah, it has a huge impact because our business lines they are now looking for other type of insurance. Meaning, in the past, we just insured the car for one year. So, the experience of the users then, also my kids is actually, I don't want to have a car insurance for a whole year because I'm only driving twice a month, a car. So they would like to have an insurance like insure what you use. >> Stu: As a service? >> As a service. And therefore we have to adapt this into completely other models because with our legacy systems, it's impossible. So what is our business doing? They're going out, looking for startup companies. Bringing them in and the startup companies, they start, typically in a cloud environment. They're very agile. And then when they bring out the product, the first thing is they ask for a connection to the legacy systems, for customer relationship management systems and stuff like this. So I have to really change my organization completely. And so I have to go away from these silos organization parts, into DevOps. And I also have to change my data center because I have to provide these services also as a cloud service, as it is possible in the public cloud, so. Meaning, the digitalization in the business has absolutely direct impact to my organization. >> I'd buy that service. I've got four kids, three driving, two at college. They really only need it a couple of months out of the year. I'll switch insurance companies. Give me a call. (laughing) All right, excellent. Thanks very much for coming on The Cube. Markus, we really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back. Continuous coverage of continuous data protection, continuous content flow. VeeamON 2017. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back, Mario Angers is here. He's the senior manager of systems at the University of British Columbia. Welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you, thank you. >> So how's VeeamON going? >> So far, so good. It's fabulous, actually. I love the event, cause it's not so big that you can't talk to a lot of people, and it's small enough that you get to know a lot of different folks. >> Yeah, it feels bigger, they're saying the number's 3,000. It feels bigger than that to me, but at the same time it is kind of intimate. >> Yeah no, I went to their first event, so certainly this is very different than what it was like. I think their first event was 2014? So, yeah, that's very good. >> So, tell us what's going on up at British Columbia. What's hot these days? >> Well, I spoke to this a little bit yesterday during the partner session, right? So, British Columbia's in a bit of unique position, because we have laws that prevent us from storing data outside Canada, right? So up until recently, we didn't have any of the large service providers, so we had to basically, to some degree, reinvent the wheel. So if wanted to provide or consume cloud, we had to basically build it, which is what the University of British Columbia did a few years ago. And, because we're the largest in BC, we were doing it at scale already, so we were approached by an organization inside British Columbia called BCNET, which basically services all the other higher ed, and they asked us if we wanted to provide cloud services to the community, and we've been doing this for almost three years now. >> Dave: As a partner to BCED? >> Yeah, to BCNET, yeah. >> Dave: BCNET, yeah. >> So we're basically the service operator, they're the service provider, right, but we do everything, we take care of the marketing, the communication. >> And Mark, could you walk us through, what's that stack look like? I did an interview with the OpenStack Summit with a Massachusetts higher ed cloud that they built that used OpenStack as the underlying piece. What's yours built on? >> So we went with, we're a VMware shop. So we went with the cloud directory as the front end basically, but the back end is a combination of Cisco servers, HP servers, net op storage, HP storage, data domain for our backup. Of course we use Veeam for our backup software, and then it's VMware stack end-to-end. >> Okay, it was funny, the gentlemen that I interviewed, actually, was the one who created VCD, when he was at VMware, so I'm just curious to see your viewpoint. One of the things we use to say is, cloud is not virtualization plus, but if you build a stack, if you can have kind of the orchestration and management pieces... So you feel you have a cloud, what differentiates what you have today, versus what you could have built five years ago? >> Well, I think five years ago, it would have been really challenging to provide the services in a self service capability to our end users. So today we can do that. The only involvement we have is we provision a virtual data center for our end user, and then it's self service from there, for them. We also use NSX, which is also a VMware product, so it's self service end-to-end. >> And how has your availability become better with what you have today versus what you had before? >> Veeam is a significant partner of ours, so we've been a Veeam customer for probably five or six years now, on the backup and restore side, probably about four years, and I would say it's made our jobs a lot easier. So historically our legacy backup system was just a bear and a monster to manage. So it required a huge amount of time to not just manage, but understand how it was done. With Veeam, they've really simplified that process, and we have a very large environment, and we basically have one guy managing backup. >> So it used to be, well that's pretty good productivity. So it used to be the conversation around, "Well, we're meeting our backup within the window." That was sort of the challenge. >> Mario: Yep. >> And now increasingly, it's, we want to get as close as RPO zero as possible for certain apps, not everything, as it's too expensive, and we want a much faster recovery time objective. So can you talk to us, first of all, do you converse in those terms with your line of business, and have you been able to affect those metrics? >> So, we're not quite there yet, from a sophistication, or a maturity perspective, We still have a bit of a ways to go to get there. However, can we now guarantee to our folks that we'll be able to bring workloads back within the service level that we have with our customers? Absolutely. So we can provide peace of mind now, knowing that if we lose something we can bring it back very quickly, as it's actually being restored to the production environment. >> So where do you want to go from here? It sounds like you've got the productivity thing nailed. You got one person managing all this, and you're able to meet those SLAs. What's next? >> I would say next for us is, so today we provide what I'll call a managed service around backup. So basically, the team that I manage is looking after backup for all the clients within the service, so our next step is really to provide them the ability to manage that themselves. So we're looking to do that over the summer. Once we do that, then we want to start partnering with Veeam as well and start looking at their Cloud Connect product. We've been in discussions for some time now about how we're going to do that, and that's the evolution of that. And then building on that, we're being also asked to add to the portfolio of services that we provide, and one of those services is disaster recovery as a service. So that's becoming very, very critical to the province. Vancouver is basically like San Francisco or Los Angeles. We live in one of the biggest fault zones in the world, so at one point it will happen. So now we've basically provisioned a data center in the middle of the province where it's outside your quake zone, so now we can start providing those services to our community. >> Could you speak to the relationship with Veeam with the storage arrays that you have? What's the interaction there? >> So when we went to Veeam it was really important that the full integration is there with the storage vendors that we have. So originally we were primarily in that app shop. So in that, integration was in place. So when we started looking at moving off of tape and moving onto disk for backup, we basically narrowed the list down to vendors that also fully integrated with Veeam. So we chose Data Domain, an EMC product. We've been very happy. And just recently we went to RFPing, we basically selected a new vendor for virtualization storage. And the same rules apply. Full integration needs to be in place. We need to be able to know that we're going to be able to read the data off of the storage arrays, and then move it to the backup. Without that integration, there's no guarantees that we can do that successfully. >> So a data demand customer, happy with that as the backup appliance, fast, great data reduction... Didn't EMC get you in a headlock and say, "You got to buy Networker and Avamar," and really push hard? >> Mario: Oh they tried. >> Of course, they did try. >> Okay, so what led to your decision to go with Veeam? >> The complexity of those solutions. So we're not going to reinvent how we're structured or how we're architected just to put a backup solution in place. And if you look at a lot of the other really big vendors in the marketplace today, that's basically the expectation, is okay well, you're built out like this, now you're going to have to do this in order to consume our solution. That just wasn't an option for us. >> And some people would say, "Well I get one thrown to choke and that simplifies things," but you don't buy that. >> Mario: No, not at all. I think it keeps vendors honest if you have more than one. It gives you some leverage to be able to negotiate. And to be quite honest with you, I've yet to find another vendor that provides the level of quality and support that Veeam does. And they're growing as a company, and I expect that things will change to some degree, because that's part of growing. However, so far, the experience that we've had is the same we had four years ago when they were a relatively small company. >> Can you give an example of what resonates with you as customer in terms of that service experience? >> I think as a bunch of IT guys, we think we know everything, right? So when we originally acquired Veeam, we thought, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we get what you're telling us, but we know better than you do." So we went ahead and implemented based on what we felt was right. It wasn't right. So they didn't come over and say, "Told you so," or "We're not going to help you now, cause you decided to go this way." No, they provided us with all the support we needed in order to actually change what we had done, and there was never any finger pointing or any... It was basically, "You're a partner, we're going to help you be successful." And that's very rare, I think, in the industry today. >> Yeah, really, respecting sort of that you wanted to do it a certain way, and now I learned. >> Yeah, they did try to talk us out of it, but we decided to move in that direction anyway. To me it's like, yeah, it's a fantastic relationship. >> Anything that you've seen here today, or this week, the announcements, that was really interesting and exciting to you? >> Yeah, I think a lot of the things that are coming in Version 10 are going to allow us to expand on the things that we provide to our customers. For example, all the stuff they talk about around availability, primarily disaster recovery stuff, which is such a big thing for us. So I think this is going to add significant value. >> Mario, anything either Veeam or your vendor ecosystem that you're looking for that would make your life easier? You seem to have a pretty opinionated view of what you need. >> So to me is, we're it the business of solving problems. So as a vendor, you're not going to help me solve my problem unless you understand what my problem is. In my experience, I'm not going to say with all vendors, but with a lot of vendors in the past couple of years, is basically the caliber of the sales people I feel have changed. So it used to be that the sales folks used to be pretty knowledgeable about what they sold. Now it feels like all they're trying to do is make their quarter. And as a customer it's becoming frustrating, because I don't want to be sold to. I want someone that's going to help me solve problems, and deliver solutions to my customers. >> You must get a lot of different storage infrastructures, but NetApp is a primary supplier, of course. >> Mario: Yep, it's still very big in our environment. >> We just had NetApp on with Veeam, and they were talking about their relationship. As a customer, how do you find the relationship between Veeam and NetApp? Is there tangible value that you see in that working relationship? How do you interact with those two different companies? >> Oh of course there's tangible value. So we're an enterprise customer, right? And as we scaled within our environment, we came into a bottleneck between Veeam and NetApp. And all we had to do was expose it to both companies, and they worked together to resolve the issue. And I believe it was Version Nine that they released a fix for it. But that's been the experience, is the work that happens behind the scenes, we're not exposed to that, it always creates a positive experience for us in the end. >> We had Dave Russell on earlier from Gartner, and he was talking about pricing, and licensing, and specifically socket-based pricing, and said that that had a big impact on the marketplace. From a customer standpoint, what can you share with us about licensing, pricing, strategies that you employ, and maybe advice for other customers? >> So I think a lot of vendors are starting to try to simplify their licensing. Because if you look, I'm not going to pick on anyone specific, but they had, "Okay well we're going to sell you a number of VMs and then the storage on top of that." And it's like, okay that doesn't make sense. I don't want a PhD in math to be able to calculate how much I'm going to spend for licensing. So give me a model that is easy to manage, and I'm going to know exactly what my cost is, and have a very predictable cost going forward. And I understand Veeam has a couple different model, but they're still very simple. So you're either subscription or you're socket. So to me, just keep it simple. >> Dave: What's your preference? >> Right now it's socket. However, I'm not opposed to looking at something different. If it makes sense for my clients, I'm perfect fine with it. >> When you go subscription, does that have an effect? Does your CFO like that? Switching to a radical model? >> Well, we're just basically turning our capital into operational. And as long as my base cost doesn't change, I think it's perfectly fine. >> Dave: So from a capital budget standpoint, it's got to be neutral and go from there. >> Excellent, alright Mario, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great insights. >> Thank you for having me. >> Dave: You're very welcome. Keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody, I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech-coverage. This is day one of our continuous coverage of VeeamON, continuous coverage of continuous data protection. Big theme here today. Maria Olson is here, she's the vice president of Global & Strategic Alliances at NetApp. Andy Vandeveld is back, he's the vice president of Global Alliances at Veeam. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Thank you, nice to be here. >> Thank you. >> So, first of all, let's start with Maria. So VeeamON, big show, a lot of action. How's it going? >> You know, the energy here is amazing here. I remember being at VeeamON years before, and what I see here in terms of the number of customers and partners, and starting to see the big growth in the enterprise market. And all the announcements and innovation that they've made today is fantastic. >> There's like a groundswell right? We've been following NetApp for years. You guys have the best snapshot technology in the marketplace, customers love it and very efficient, and have always had an interesting take on data protection. And data fabric obviously is a big theme of NetApp these days, so explain that to us and we can get into how you guys partner. >> Sure absolutely, so most companies think of us as a storage company, but we really have evolved from a storage company to a data management company. We have a full portfolio of products, including all of our All Flash FAS offerings. We did an acquisition, which was our largest acquisition with SolidFire as well. We also have back up to Cloud offerings with our AltaVault offering that backs up to Azure and Amazon. We have StorageGRID Webscale. We have a very full, large portfolio. What all this allows customers to do, and where NetApp is heading is in terms of being able to manage and move the date, regardless of where it's at. So I call this, the gold opportunity. I just came back from SAPPHIRE, you talk to Bill McDermott, he talks about how data's gold. You heard the same thing here with Peter McKay as well. And to me the whole thing, it doesn't matter if the gold's there, you got to be able to manage it, and monetize, and do something with it. And that's what NetApp helps provide. >> So Andy, that sounds very consistent with the strategy that Veeam is putting forth. >> Yes. >> That we heard certainly this morning, and throughout this conference. So what's the partnership? Where do you pick up and NetApp leave off, or vice versa? >> Well, so in the date protection space, it's the ability to manage the data, to make sure that it's getting into a form that can be stored and accessed and available as quickly as possible, is really what we're focusing on. And to do that, we need partners like NetApp, who have the infrastructure assets that we can leverage. Particularly as we move more and more into the enterprise business with enterprise customers. Those customer's are spitting off a lot of data. They need their data to be available as quickly as possible in the case of an outage or some other disruption to their business. And to do that, Veeam needs infrastructure partners that have robust portfolios that can handle that sort of requirement, and that's where the relationship with NetApp comes into play. And it's been very good for us over the years. >> I like this notion of data fabric, has a connotation of fluidity, and it sort of reminds me of the Veeam Waves here a little bit. So explain more Maria, if you will, the data fabric, what is that concept, how are customers actually getting value out of it? >> Absolutely, so data fabric was more of a framework, right? We don't have a SKU that you just go buy data fabric. It's really a framework and a portfolio of products, integrated with our ecosystem of partners like Veeam, to be able to manage and move the data. Regardless if it's on PRIM, or where they want to go as part of their digital transformation. So customers are all at different phases in terms of where they want to go, in terms of becoming more of a digitally-oriented business. And we help get them there through the journey, because of the strength that we have on the on premise side, as well as the integrations that we've done with our partner ecosystem, specifically with Veeam and others. So we can help move them in that direction. >> So take that a little bit further, in terms of, so the customer sees this vast portfolio. Andy you were talking before about NetApps infrastructure. It's pretty vast, it's a leader in it's space. What are they asking you guys for? What are they challenging you to do? Specifically in the context of data protection. >> So customers are asking us, number one, make sure that it's simple. And that's one of the big value props that Veeam makes, number one. >> And NetApp over the years. >> And NetApp too. That it's always on and available. That there is no disaster that occurs, that the data is there, that we know where it is, that we can manage it, we can back it up. Those are the big things. The third things customers are asking for, is help us in terms of, how do we digitally transform our business? It's the business outcome that they're looking for. Of which, the products that NetApp and Veeam does, is a subset of that, that helps them on that journey. So they can actually digitally migrate, and become more of a digitally-oriented business, with our offerings helping in the whole backup and recovery and whole data management space. >> Yeah and I would just sort of tag onto that, customer's consumption models are changing. So they're on PRIM, they're in a private Cloud, they're in a public Cloud. The way that they consume is changing, and it's different. And no two look the same. And I think what customers are telling us is, let us decide how we're going to consume. You just be able to accommodate that consumption. And that's really what we've been focusing on. So if it's in an on PRIM environment, great. If it's in a public Cloud, fantastic. If it's some hybrid model, that's great too. We can accommodate that, and that's really what customers are asking us. As well as making sure that we accommodate the various business models that exist. So whether it's purchasing licenses, or some subscription-based models or whatever, they want that flexibility and that's what they're asking us to provide. >> Maria, I'm wondering if you have any joint customers that you're highlighting here at the show, or any specific examples you might be able to walk us through. >> So we have several joint customers, as a matter of fact, you heard Peter McKay talk about 210,000 customers. Of those, 30% are NetApp, so it's a very big area. And now, in terms of some of the announcements they've made, in terms of supporting NaaS, in terms of physical environment. NetApp is the leader in that space, so it's even going to become broader. So you saw today, in terms of Peter McKay talking about the Denver Broncos, that's a big NetApp customer in terms of the solutions that they have there. Also, Telefónica was announced there. Very large service provider. It's another very big NetApp customer. So there's a lot of customers in the enterprise space. Veeam's more known in terms of the s and v space, but when you start to look at the momentum they've had in going up the stack, there's a lot of enterprise customers that we actually are jointly engaging with. >> I would just say that the more that we penetrate the enterprise market and the service provider market, the more that we're going to need partnerships like we have with NetApp. To become stronger, because they're the trusted advisors, the ones that the customers are listening to. It's easier for us just to ride on their coattails into these opportunities than to try to create these relationships all ourselves. That's what makes this such a great partnership for us. >> The Cloud service customer channel base has come up a couple times today. But we haven't really explored some of the fundamental assumptions behind it. And what I want to ask you guys is, everybody sees the ascendancy of Amazon. Very impressive, amazing growth. Yet at the same time, your respective Cloud service provider businesses are also growing very rapidly. >> Maria: Very much. >> So you've got the disruption to the traditional legacy enterprise business we all have covered that very well. But there's not much been discussed about what's going to happen within the Cloud business. There's maybe some camp that says, okay everything's going to go to Amazon and I think many people believe that. But what's happening within the Cloud service provider base? It seems to be quite fragmented, which is a good thing for you guys. It seems to be local in nature, very specialized services, and ability to compete with Amazon and Azure, because they're not competing necessarily with scale volume, they're competing in other ways. So I wonder if you could help us unpack that a little bit. As to what's happening in your respective bases there. >> Yeah, so we're seeing a lot of momentum in the service provider space. So we've sold a lot of storage and data management over to what the large new service providers of the world. The IBM SoftLayers, the Azures, Google Cloud Platform. All of them as well as the existing ones, the AT&Ts and the Verizons and Telefónicas of the world. And so we continue to see a fragmentation there. You kind of have the new world service providers, and the old world service providers. And they're all trying to figure out the business model, so they can make sure that they're all going to be there over the next 20, 25 years to see how this whole game evolves. But we have a big footprint in both of those camps. And as a matter of fact, one of the things I love about the relationship between NetApp an Veeam, is we're companies that are embracing Cloud. We're not fighting Cloud, we're really trying to embrace it. So we have multiple offerings in terms of NetApp across our storage and date management, across all the new emerging Cloud players, and the existing one. And Veeam also has pretty deep relationships. They just announced today in offerings with AWS, and with Microsoft Azure as well. >> Dave: Anything you'd add Andy? >> Yeah, I think you're right about the market being a little bit more fragmented. There are smaller, more specialized Cloud providers. And there's a set of customers that want that. So I think it kind of gets back to the point that I was making earlier, which is the consumption models are changing. And who they consume from, in terms of Cloud, is not 100% consistent, and so we need to be able to deliver the technology that can accommodate whatever that decision is that the customer makes. >> From a partnership perspective, how does something like this start? And what do you, I mean obviously you say, let's go to market together. That's a logical starting point, but then there's maybe some other integration that has to take place. What do you guys sort of set out to accomplish? What are the milestones, the metrics, that you try to, how do you measure success on a partnership like this? How do you know when it's going to work, and is working? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Number one, you first have to have alignment in terms of what solutions you're going to go out there and build. And I think part of the secret of the success of the relationship, if you think back in terms of, NetApp made a big bet in virtualized environments. In doing big differentiated offerings with VMware. Even though their owned by EMC. And we we're extremely successful, 50,000 joint customers. You look at Veeam, they made a big bet with VMware, so our installed basis and the co-nih-va-tion and development that we've done already there, is already paid off there in spades. So number one, you got to have the co-nih-va-tion and the solution that you're building. The second thing is an aligned go-to-market, in terms of what is our go-to-market plan, how are we doing that through the channel? Is it a comprehensive program? What does that look like? And then it comes down to people at the end of the day, and the culture. Do the companies have really good cultures and people that really want to go at, and execute those plans? >> Yeah, and we have strong alignment at the executive levels as well, which helps. Because you need to have that sort of strategic vision, you're looking out 18 months, 24 months. Are we in alignment? And I think that helps. I would say another strong metric for Veeam is our Net Promoter Score, we're 73, it's off the charts, it's fantastic. That doesn't happen if you're not delivering the right solutions with the right set of partners. And to us, that's just another metric of, how successful are these partnerships? Particularly the one that we have with NetApp. >> And actually, I looked at NetApps Net Promoter Score, and we're 64, so we're way up there as well. So that's another area that we're very aligned as well. >> You know NPS is interesting. If you're, you're not really a one-product company, but you're smaller, and so it's easier to have a high NPS when you're smaller. Now, of course you've got on-tap. >> I wanted to be on that graph up there on the key note. >> That's pretty good. (group laughing) I was at ServiceNow last week, and they have a very happy customer base, and they were touting their, I think 53 NPS. And that's, so 60's for a company the size of NetApp. And you guys, like you say, off the charts. So that's impressive, go ahead Stu. >> Yeah just the last piece you talked about, some of the announcements that were made that impact, including in v 10, there's going to be NaaS. We look forward, anything that we should be looking to measure success of the partnerships, and anything that your companies are working on together that you can speak to. >> Well I think at the end of the day, it's customers and revenue. Ensuring that that continues to grow. Veeam's on fire, they've got 210,000 customers, they're growing at 450-- >> 245,000 at the end of-- >> 45, and every day they're adding 200 customers a day. >> Peter corrected me. (group laughing) >> Right, yeah exactly, so I really think we measure it by customers and revenue, in terms of how we're driving. And then new solution areas, like I said, with Cloud we're very aligned in both companies, embracing Cloud. Big opportunity to go after some of these service provider areas. >> Yeah, I think we're going to continue to focus on delivering joint solutions. That's really kind of, if I had to put my finger on one thing, watch this space. It's joint solutions we want to put out to the marketplace that are going to benefit our customers. >> All right, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you. >> All right, thank you. >> Thank you. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back, rockin' New Orleans with theCube VeeamON 2017. (upbeat techno music) (keyboard typing)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCube. Covering VeeamOn 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back, Mahmoud Yassin is here, he's the Data Center Manager of the National Bank of Abu Dhabi. >> Good to see you. >> Nice to meet you. >> I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman, this is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. So, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you. >> Tell us about VeeamOn, what's your experience been like so far? >> Actually it is not the first time for me, I was here in the last few years. It's a very nice experience, mix it up with all IT companies, listening to people, leaders like Cisco, VMWare, Amazon, understanding what is the technology, how the market is moving, this is a great experience, great experience. >> Tell us about what's going on in the banking industry in your world in terms of the challenges and in particular, what's happening with the need for availability and uptime. >> I think you heard about what's happening last two days about Crayon, all the mobiles of all the IT people never stopped about the people and the need for restoring and restoring the machine cause of the people hit by crime virus or malware that encrypted the whole machine and you need to restore the data. This is happening all the time, there's not only banks in there, across different sections, three four days back, UK, the whole healthcare sector was stopped due to cyber attacks so availability and security has become so tight and of course banking means money, money is a big target for cyber-criminals. So we are caring about availability much much much more than before, it's not a matter of just fulfilling the checkbox and like what we have done in many years in IT, backup was a checkbox, just a checkbox, it's not anymore , no luxury to have the backup as a checkbox anymore. >> Checkbox meaning, okay I have-- >> I'm compliant, I have backup. >> We did it, we don't know if it failed or not but we did the backup. >> We did the backup, we tick it, we have the backup, we have the backup process, everything is okay. But have you never restored, restore in time, ensure the data availability is okay. How much data for how long? Regulation became as well very tough for the financial sector so you look at countries now that are asking for 15 to 20 years of data retention. So imagine your backups you need to maintain, multimedia, media is not sufficient anymore. Which tape drives will be sufficient for 15 to 20 years? After ten years, the tape will be rotten, it will not work, it will not be readable in the machine. And the data side as well is becoming a challenge so you need to offload the data to a desk, you need to offload the data to somewhere else that you ensure your availability and you need to ensure all that you can restore this data back. >> It's interesting you know, in IT we've known ransomware as something that's been discussed for a while, but now all of your customers know what it is. >> All of the customers, every one of them. >> So does that change the role? >> It's hitting the kids in the school, it's hitting everyone. >> You know, Dave's been talking for the last year that security has been like a board level discussion. Now it's your users, how much do your end users start coming and wanting to understand how secure money is. >> A lot, a lot. >> And how does that impact your role in IT? >> A lot, actually National Bank for Abu Dhabi security is one of our label, one of the safest banks, one of the 50 safest banks, this is one of our label. And we take security, we are the first customer in the Middle East to implement the RSA talking for login for online banking. This was eight years back. >> What about, I got to ask you, I follow a little bit of the banking executives and see what they're talking about and blockchain comes up a lot. This notion of trust between two parties and so forth. Do you see that as a mega-trend, is it something that's sort of an interesting trend? I mean what're your thoughts on that? >> It is the future, this is the future. >> It's the future? >> This is the future of the money. Money will be part to part with encryption and with the mechanism to get keys. And this is, people who don't want, this is where the money is moving in. >> So what happens to-- >> Actually what blocks this from happening on a wider scale is it's still, the regulation is not enough around this area, there is not enough regulation, so good money can mix with bad money and to be untraceables, he says this is one of the things. So people are starting putting a certain regulation across to start regulating, it will take time but it will be there. >> So blockchain is interesting, banking executives saying it's the future because everybody says oh blockchain's going to disrupt the banks but what I'm hearing from you is it's both, maybe it's a threat but it's also an opportunity because right now it's all done in secret, and so there needs to be. >> It's not in secret, it's done in Swift, the only platform for exchanging money worldwide is Swift. And sooner or later this will be changing, though some people are blockers, some people are, but it will be changing and the banks will realize this, adapt to blockchain technology. There's some legal services for blockchain and sooner you'll find central banks across the whole worldwide are starting regulating the blockchain. >> Yeah, okay it's very interesting because everybody says it's such a disruptive force which it is. >> It is a disruptive force. >> But it's also an, as you say, an opportunity. Where does Veeam fit with your availability strategy? >> It is in the center of our availability strategy, >> Really? >> Veeam is, I'm running my data centers and 90% of my data center is virtualized. So Veeam is running the whole virtual world in my data center, the 10% is running on traditional backup solution, which is, still we can't get rid of because you know in banking you have a critical system that measures 20 to 80 so you have running 80% of your system in virtual but actually the core system is the 20% so this is still not virtualized. Your core banking legacy application and some other stuff, so you have still to take the back up in traditional ways. And we mix both together, we mix back up data backing up the information, back up the virtual environment, this is very important for me. >> Dave: And you have a service catalog essentially? >> Mahmoud: We have service catalog for restore. >> For your data protection services right? >> For data protection of course. >> And what, like bronze, silver, gold levels or is it more granular than that or less granular? >> We have more, actually, in discussion with business we all were trying to meet the business requirements. So the most important for business in the banking section is the availability of the communication, mailboxes, availability of the critical detail in the databases. This is the things that we are taking care of. And Veeam has done a lot of development over the time, I'm first customer for Veeam from the Middle East by the way. >> Really? >> Yes. (laughter) >> Pioneer. (laughter) >> We are pioneer, and we've done it after trying them extensively in our environment and we decided that this is the best solution this time to go for virtual environment. It was extensive evaluation done across multiple vendor and we select them. >> And did that give you a competitive advantage? >> Of course, of course. >> How so? >> The ability to restore faster, the ability to do uptime faster, the ability to recover and ensure your back up is secure. This is something very valuable. >> Some of the other customers we've spoken to today have said that the announcements were meeting some of the wishlist that they have. Anything jump out at you with the announcements made so far? Things on your list that they-- >> Actually the continuous application is a very good feature. >> In the CDP, yeah. >> Yeah. It is one of the most important features we used as a traditional application of Vim backup. Last year, to move my data center from place to place, we were hosted somewhere and we moved the data center, the whole data center. It is good, but it was taking time, so continuous application will give you the availability of all those, just divert your backup somewhere and you'll be up and running. This is a very important feature. >> Anything that is on your wishlist that they haven't gotten to yet or things that you're looking for? >> I see, I see, Veeam should more personal devices, we are talking about IoT, internet of things, bring your own devices to work, so we should go more backing up the usual details on mobiles on at least the corporate one on the corporate bubble like Citrix, like whatever good solution, whatever solution is used. You can backing up design, backup solution for this, for end users this will be a huge thing. This will be, and part of the security of the organization cause you need all those to ensure if you add device of one employee you can restore this data back and ensure this data is restorable. >> This is the pain point for you today. >> It is. >> And it's going to get worse. I'll give you the last word, things have been exciting you at the show or conversations that you've had. >> No actually the keynote speech today was amazing, especially when you're understanding the direction of big companies like Cisco, VMWare, this is what's very valuable, very valuable. >> Excellent, well listen, thanks very much for coming we really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back rapid fire from VeeamOn 2017, be right back. (funky music) (tense music)